While I'm under contract to write a book I
suspended weekly editions of Tidbits. However, when my monthly editions of New
Bookmarks become too cluttered with tidbits I will occasionally come out with a
special edition of Tidbits. This is a June 16, 2008 special edition.

Hi Dena,

It’s been a cold and
somewhat dry spring up here. The Lupin are late and not quite as impressive as
usual now
that they’re blooming. I think it’s been too bloomin’ cold in the mountains.

We finally got
some nice rain, but we could use much more.

We went from running
the furnace two days ago to running the air conditioners yesterday and today.
There is no spring up here. They’re too seasons --- winter and summer, although
we started running the air conditioners when the temperature hit 80 degrees so
summer here is not like summer in Texas.

My heating bill
may go from $2,500 to $5,000 next year. I haven’t heard about how cooling
costs are going in Texas. One advantage of air conditioners is that A/C
units became more more efficient the last 20 years. There’s not much new technology in
furnaces. Some people up here may close off parts of their houses for the
coldest months. There are millions of trees up here, but heating daily with wood
in a pain in the tail. Split hardwood is also becoming more expensive.

I
proposed that we stay in bed more during the day, but Erika’s not buying into
that fuel-saving idea

On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long
and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was
generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My
wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm

Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Academics have also found Vertigo to be the most
concentrated distillation of Hitchcock's fascination with the act of seeing, a
favorite theme among film scholars for obvious reasons. The momentous glimpses,
glances, looks, and stares exchanged by Scottie and Judy/Madeleine add up to a
compendium of the gaze, illustrating its power to enthrall, gratify, deceive,
and even destroy. Associating the Hitchcockian gaze with the patriarchal gaze,
feminist critics like Laura Mulvey have often emphasized its harmful,
authoritarian effects in Vertigo and elsewhere. More eclectic commentators take
a broader view, however, finding more complexity in Hitchcock's films than
single-minded theories can encompass. In his recent book Hitchcock and
Twentieth-Century Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2005), for instance, the film
scholar John Orr says the fates of Hitchcock's characters are "bound up with
perceiving a world in flux," just as the success of his films is "bound up with
the spectator's pleasurable act of perceiving [the characters] perceiving."
Hitchcock's artistic vision is bound up with the nature of vision, and no film
penetrates its mysteries more deeply than Vertigo does. For a generation of
academics and critics, it has been a laboratory for investigating some of
cinema's most fundamental properties.David Starrett, "At 50, Hitchcock's
Timeless 'Vertigo' Still Offers a Dizzying Array of Gifts," The Chronicle
Review, June 13, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i40/40b01801.htm?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

1 Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, by Daniel
Pinkwater: “One of my all-time favorite books, period. A subversive novel
about a kid who moves from a funky urbanized inner city neighborhood to a
place where he attends Heinrich Himmler junior high and is lost among very
plastinated people. He and a friend discover an occult book shop in the
funky neighborhood and go spelunking.”

2 Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld: “Well paced, and
wildly popular. It’s about the pressures on young people to conform,
specifically to physically conform and to switch off their minds while
they’re conforming. All Westerfeld’s books are good revolutionary texts.”

3 Animal Farm, by George Orwell: “It’s probably the
most perfect bit of political exposition disguised as fairy tale of all
time.”

Regardless of who wins in November, the attitudes of
Americans toward the role of identity in democratic life are unlikely to change
much. Relative to Europe, Americans will surely remain deeply patriotic and much
more committed to their faiths. Europeans, meanwhile, may move closer to the
Americans in their views. The recent shift to the right in Europe – from the
victory of conservative leaders like Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio
Berlusconi to the surprise defeat of the leftist mayor of London, Ken Livingston
– might partially reflect a belated awareness there that a unique heritage is
under assault by a growing Muslim fundamentalism. The logic of the struggle
against this fundamentalist threat will inevitably demand the reassertion of the
European national and religious identities that are now threatened. Europeans
are now saying goodbye to Mr. Bush, and hoping for the election of an American
president who they believe shares their sophisticated postnational, postmodern
and multicultural attitudes. But don't be surprised if, in the years ahead,
European leaders, in order to protect freedom and democracy at home, start
sounding more and more like the straight-shooting cowboy from abroad they now
love to hate.Natan Sharansky, "Democracies Can't
Compromise on Core Values," The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2008; Page
A15 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121358021414976189.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

What kind of government forces people to make
gasoline out of food, artificially boosts the price of corn to $6 a bushel,
guarantees that inflated price as the "base" for higher federal subsidies to
corn farmers in the future, and then tries to hide its own depredations by
excluding high food prices from its measure of "core" inflation? Washington
never learns from its mistakes. In "The Worst Hard Time," Timothy Egan notes how
federal price supports encouraged farmers in World War I to plow up millions of
acres of dry grasslands and plant wheat. When the price of wheat crashed after
the war, the denuded land lay fallow; then it blew away during the droughts of
the 1930s, turning a big chunk of America into a Dust Bowl. Ernest S. Christian and Gary A Robbins,
"Stupidity and the State," The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2008; Page A9
---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121279364915353389.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

On top of everything else, Washington
tries to cover up the cost of its failures and incompetence by officially
misstating the government's financial results. For instance, the government
says that the tax burden will be $2.6 trillion in 2008. But counting the
"deadweight" loss from damage done by taxes to the private economy, the real
tax burden is twice that – roughly $5.2 trillion, according to various
estimates, including ones published by the National Bureau of Economic
Research and the Congressional Budget Office. On the spending side, a study
by the Office of Management and Budget showed that government programs on
average fall 39% short of meeting their goals. Thus, in 2008, government
will spend $2.7 trillion to provide $1.65 trillion of benefit.

A real tax burden of $5.2 trillion to pay
for a $1.65 trillion benefit seems a bit excessive, even by Washington
standards. Perhaps one of the presidential candidates should do the voters
the courtesy of at least telling them the truth, and asking them if they
really want quite so much government at such a high price. Then again, maybe
the voters already sense the truth, and perhaps that is why they are so
furious.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics,
the national gender ratio is 98 males to every 100 females. Compare to a global
average of 102 males to every 100 females, and to countries like China, which
has 107 males for every 100 females. Australia might not be the worst off in
this regard; America's ratio is 97 males to every 100 females, and Estonia's is
a distressing 85:100. But within Australia, the differences can be pronounced.
Six out of Australia's eight states and territories have lower numbers of males
than females. Robert Skeffington, "Man Drought,"
The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2008 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121269592936449047.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

If only the metadata accompanying e-texts were as
interesting as that found in used books! Online bookseller
AbeBooks.com recently asked its vendors about the
strangest things they've found in used books. The list will surprise you: a
Christmas card from L. Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie card, a diamond ring,
a strip of bacon, $40,000, a World War II U.S. ration book, and even "a
holographic image of a lady who sheds her clothing," among other items. Surely
similar items have turned up in collections bequeathed to academic libraries
around the country. What strange things have you found in your library's old
books?Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of
Higher Education, June 11, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3083&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Cuba is to abolish its system of equal pay for all
and allow workers and managers to earn performance bonuses, a senior official
has announced.
"Cuba to abandon salary equality," BBC News, June 12, 2008http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7449776.stm

As United States airlines reel from soaring oil
prices and a sinking domestic economy, most of their European rivals appear
better placed to ride out the storm. While no airline can avoid the oil price
shock, analysts say, European operators are benefiting from the relatively
strong euro, given that jet fuel is priced in dollars. European carriers also
fly relatively newer models of Boeing and Airbus planes, which burn 30 percent
less fuel than models from the 1970s and 1980s, many of which are still in use
by United States airlines. The New York Times, June 12, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/business/12air.html?ref=business
Jensen's Leading Questions for Obama and McCain
What are your plans to reduce the U.S. trade deficit and strengthen the U.S.
dollar? The weakening U.S. dollar, fueled by President's Bush's spendthrift
budgets, is the number one cause of high oil prices and jumps in inflation
pricing in the U.S. All other proposed causes are politicalsubterfuge intended
to avoid making the hard choices that will not win the presidency but will save
the nation.

Anyone wondering why U.S. energy policy is so
dysfunctional need only review Congress's recent antics. Members have debated
ideas ranging from suing OPEC to the Senate's carbon tax-and-regulation
monstrosity, to a windfall profits tax on oil companies, to new punishments for
"price gouging" – everything except expanding domestic energy supplies. Amid
$135 oil, it ought to be an easy, bipartisan victory to lift the political
restrictions on energy exploration and production. Record-high fuel costs are
hitting consumers and business like a huge tax increase. Yet the U.S. remains
one of the only countries in the world that chooses as a matter of policy to
lock up its natural resources. The Chinese think we're insane and
self-destructive, while the Saudis laugh all the way to the bank"$4 Gasbags," The Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2008; Page
A16 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121322599645166029.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

California won't drill for the estimated 1.3 billion
barrels of recoverable oil off its coast because of bad memories of the Santa
Barbara oil spill – in 1969. We won't drill for the estimated 5.6 billion to 16
billion barrels of oil in the moonscape known as the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge (ANWR) because of – the caribou. In 1990, George H.W. Bush, calling
himself "the environmental president," signed an order putting virtually all the
U.S. outer continental shelf's oil and gas reserves in the deep freeze. Bill
Clinton extended that lockup until 2013. A Clinton veto also threw away the key
to ANWR's oil 13 years ago. Daniel Henninger, "Drill! Drill!
Drill!," The Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2008; Page A15 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121322872046666269.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Also see
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=66441

Although the Senate's recent attempt to introduce a
cap-and-trade system for carbon crashed and burned when it collided with $4 per
gallon gasoline, fear not. Some in Congress are fearlessly tilting at another
windmill: the "windfall" profits earned by oil companies. Unfortunately, by
reducing supplies, a windfall profits tax will only lead to even higher prices.
Still, if Congress really wants to "do something" about high gasoline prices and
global warming, it can always try rationing. To lower gasoline prices
permanently, you can reduce demand, increase supply, or do both. Congress long
ago capped supplies by proclaiming from on high: Drillest thou not offshore, nor
in ANWR. The next obvious step for our solons is to cap demand by rationing
gasoline, and then gradually reduce the quantity of ration coupons. "Trading" in
coupons would be encouraged to ensure gasoline is allocated to uses of only the
highest value. So Congress could reserve quantities of ration coupons for key
lobbyists and their clients. Environmentalists could buy up coupons and "retire"
them, lowering gasoline sales even more. Refineries could continue to produce
gasoline, but as consumer demand would be sharply limited (and declining), oil
companies would be forced to reduce the prices they charge. No more windfall
profits! And lower carbon emissions!Jonathan Lesser, "Cap and Trade for
Gasoline?" The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2008; Page A9 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121340131140573813.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Also see "Carbon: Tax, Trade, or Deregulate? Something is going to be "done"
about global warming, so what should it be? A debate," by Ronald Bailey, Fred L.
Smith and Lynne Kiesling, Reason Magazine, July 2008 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/126851.html

That such musings are no merely individual quirk is
confirmed by James Baldwin in an essay written in his
mid-forties — a portion of which I have copied out onto a small piece of paper
and carried around in my wallet over the past several months. In it, Baldwin
writes: “Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly
insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are
mortal. When more time stretches behind than stretches before one, some
assessments, however reluctantly and incompletely, begin to be made. Between
what one wishes to become and what one has become there is a momentous gap,
which will now never be closed. And this gap seems to operate as one’s final
margin, one’s last opportunity, for creation. And between the self as it is and
the self as one sees it, there is also a distance even harder to gauge. Some of
us are compelled, around the middle of our lives, to make a study of this
baffling geography, less in the hope of conquering these distances than in the
determination that the distance shall not become any greater. ”This passage helps
me keep my bearings. But I’ve broken the quotation off at that point because
Baldwin then shifts to a higher pitch of personal drama than quite resonates
given my own circumstances: “One is attempting,” he writes, “nothing less than
the recreation of oneself out of the rubble which has become one’s life....”Well
now that seems a bit much. Clutter, yes, but not rubble — though in saying that,
one has the sense of tempting fate . . . For better or worse, Intellectual
Affairs is firmly planted in the “baffling geography” that Baldwin describes as
occupying the zone between what one most deeply wants and that which actually
exists. After two hundred columns, I still don’t have a map. But it’s too late
to turn back now. Scott McLemee, "200 and Counting,"
Inside Higher Ed, June 11, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/06/11/mclemee

To GOP strategists' frustration, focus groups still
show that many people don't know what Mr. Obama proposes policy-wise – and don't
care. They are drawn to his promise to move past political business as usual.
John "My Friends" McCain won't be able to match his rival's verbal mojo. He's
instead going to have to counter with a compelling theme of his own. First,
he'll have to find one. Kimberly A. Strassel, "What We've
Learned About Barack," The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2008; Page A13
---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121270837880050313.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

And finally, how much more will college attendance
increase? Will it go to 100 percent (currently, about 60 percent of high school
graduates go on to college--of course many kids drop out of high school)? That
depends on two factors: the brain/brawn tradeoff, and IQ (or some alternative
measure of intellectual aptitude). If the intellectual demands of work relative
to the physical demands continue to increase, the demand for college will also
increase. IQ is, though, a limiting factor. But it is less of a limiting factor
than one might think. The reason is that a frequent byproduct of technological
advance is deskilling.Richard Posner, "The Boom in College
Education," The Becker-Posner Blog, June 9, 2008 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
Jensen Comment
I wonder if Becker and Posner would've written their commentaries differently if
they were Wal-Mart Greeters for a week?

We are nearing the end of American identity politics
as we know it. Bearing that gift to those who prize the individual over the
tribal is a messenger who shared a Hyde Park neighborhood with Milton Friedman,
though with a public record that suggests he is more statist than classical
liberal.But Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.),
can’t be categorized that simply. He is, rather, an intellectual and ideological
work in progress. Not stuck in cable-babble caricatured time, he may be
traveling the circuitous path many “liberal-tarians”—or libertarian Democrats
like me—treaded as we grew and found our way back to the self-reliant values
that informed our pluralistic democracy. We lost those values in the Industrial
and Progressive eras, when advocates of centralized planning prized society’s
perfection over individual liberty. While Obama’s positions don’t exactly
channel the Cato Institute, his departure from usual Democratic Party
left-liberalism is reflected in the left’s suspicion of him for not having all
the 162-point plans of Sen. Hillary Clinton, or spewing the syrupy populism of
trial lawyer to the underclass, Sen. John Edwards.Terry Michael, "Obama as the End of
Identity Politics as We've Known Them (And I Feel Fine)," Reason Magazine,
June 10, 2008 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/126944.html

But in many ways, it will be business as usual in
Washington DC with or without President Obama
An Absurd Way to Bring About "So-Called Change" in
Washington: Let Yesterday's Thieves Pave the Way for More Theft

A former CEO of mortgage financing giant Fannie
Mae, Mr. Johnson is now vetting Vice Presidential candidates for Mr. Obama.
But he is also a textbook case for poor disclosure as regulators sifted
through the wreckage of Fannie's $10 billion accounting scandal. Despite an
exhaustive federal inquiry, Mr. Johnson managed to avoid disclosing one very
special perk: below-market interest-rate mortgages from Countrywide
Financial, arranged by Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo. Journal reporters
Glenn Simpson and James Hagerty broke the story this weekend.

Fannie Mae tells us that Mr. Johnson did not inform
the company's board of these sweetheart mortgage deals, nor did his CEO
successor Franklin Raines, who also received such loans. We can understand
why. Fannie bought mortgages from loan originator Countrywide, and then
packaged them into securities for sale or kept the loans and profited from
the interest. Mr. Mozilo told Dow Jones in 1995 that he was "working very
closely . . . with Jim Johnson of Fannie Mae to come up with a rational
method of making the process more efficient by the use of credit scoring."

Since Fannie was buying Countrywide's loans, under
terms set by Mr. Johnson and later Mr. Raines – or by people in their employ
– the fact that Fannie's CEO had a separate personal financial relationship
with Countrywide was an obvious conflict of interest. The company's code of
conduct required prior approval of such arrangements. Neither Mr. Johnson
nor Mr. Raines sought such approval, according to Fannie.

Even if they had received waivers from the board to
enjoy these perks, conscientious board members would then have wanted to
disclose the waivers to investors. Post-Enron, the Sarbanes-Oxley law
requires such disclosures. But even in the late-1990s, when the Friends of
Angelo loans began, board members would likely have raised red flags.

Former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt tells us that "the
best way to deal with issues like this is not to have these kinds of
relationships. From both the Countrywide and the Fannie perspective, it is
simply bad policy to permit loans to 'friends' on more favorable terms than
others similarly situated would be able to get."

One question is whether Messrs. Johnson and Raines
were using their position to pad their own incomes that were already
fabulous thanks to an implicit taxpayer subsidy. (See the table nearby.) But
the bigger issue is whether they steered Fannie policy into giving Mr.
Mozilo and Countrywide favorable pricing, which means they helped to
facilitate the mortgage boom and bust that Countrywide did so much to
promote. A further federal probe would seem to be warranted, and we assume
Barney Frank and his fellow mortgage moralists will want to dig into this
palm-greasing from Capitol Hill.

The irony here is that Mr. Obama has denounced Mr.
Mozilo as part of his populist case against corporate excess, calling Mr.
Mozilo and a colleague in March "the folks who are responsible for infecting
the economy and helping to create a home foreclosure crisis." Obama campaign
manager David Plouffe also said in March that "If we're really going to
crack down on the practices that caused the credit and housing crises, we're
going to need a leader who doesn't owe these industries any favors." But now
this protector of the working class has entrusted his first big task as
Presidential nominee to the very man who received "favors" in return for
enriching Mr. Mozilo.

Yesterday, ABC News asked Mr. Obama whether he
should have more carefully vetted Mr. Johnson and Eric Holder, who is
working with Mr. Johnson on veep vetting. Correspondent Sunlen Miller noted
Mr. Johnson's loans from Countrywide and Mr. Holder's involvement as Deputy
Attorney General in the Clinton Administration in the pardon of fugitive
Marc Rich. Said Mr. Obama: "Everybody, you know, who is tangentially related
to our campaign, I think, is going to have a whole host of relationships – I
would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters."

Vetting Mr. Johnson's finances would have been time
well spent, judging by a May 2006 report from Fannie Mae's regulator, the
Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (Ofheo). Even if Mr. Obama
considers the advisers helping him select a running mate "tangentially
related" to his campaign, he might have thought twice about any relationship
with Mr. Johnson.

Addressing the company's too smooth (and
fraudulent) reported earnings growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s,
Ofheo reported: "Those achievements were illusions deliberately and
systematically created by the Enterprise's senior management with the aid of
inappropriate accounting and improper earnings management . . . By
deliberately and intentionally manipulating accounting to hit earnings
targets, senior management maximized the bonuses and other executive
compensation they received, at the expense of shareholders."

* * * The regulator described how, despite an
internal Fannie analysis that valued Mr. Johnson's 1998 compensation at
almost $21 million, the summary compensation table in the firm's 1999 proxy
suggested his pay was no more than $7 million. Ofheo found that Fannie had
actually drafted talking points to deflect such media questions as: "He's
trying to hide how much he's made, isn't he?" and "Gimme a break. He's
hiding his compensation."

To this list we would add one more, directed at Mr.
Obama: Is this what you mean by bringing change to Washington?

UpdateJames A. Johnson, the consummate Washington insider
whom Senator Barack Obama tapped to head his vice-presidential search effort,
resigned abruptly on Wednesday to try to silence a growing furor over his
business activities. Mr. Johnson’s departure deprives Mr. Obama of decades of
experience and access to Washington’s power elite. Mr. Johnson has been a
fixture in Washington political and legal circles for three decades, and he led
the vice-presidential search team for Senator John Kerry, the Democrats’
presidential nominee in 2004.
John M. Broder and Leslie Wayne, The New York Times, June 12,2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/politics/12veep.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Local officials in this liberal city say it's time
for the U.S. Marines to move out. The Berkeley City Council has voted to tell
the Marines their downtown recruiting station is not welcome and "if recruiters
choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome guests." The measure
passed this week by a vote of 8-1.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,327347,00.html

Jensen Comment
I can't think of anybody in Berkeley that the Marines would want.

The Berkeley City Council rescinded its earlier outright ban on the Marine recruiters
the fear that the University of California at Berkeley might lose hundreds of
millions in Federal government research contracts. The City of Berkeley does not
want to go too far in antagonizing its only good asset
--- the University of California. But the Berkeley City Council never passes up
a chance to insult the U.S. military. The only less-friendly cities to the U.S.
military are neighboring San Francisco and possibly Tehran although they might
be more polite about in Tehran.

Researchers at the University of
Munich have created new environmentally friendly bombs. The explosives commonly
used now by military and industry (such as TNT and RDX) hurt not only their
intended targets, but the environment as well by releasing toxic gases. They are
also relatively unsafe to handle,
LiveScience reports.The German scientists used tetrazoles to create
explosives that release fewer toxic byproducts. Does this make you feel bad
about not recycling?Catherine Rampel, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3057&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Question
What famous retailer is known for abusing accounts payable to vendors?

Hint:
In this mart, the buyer puts vendors to the “Wal.”

If textbook vendors were smart,
they'd just use Scott Adams for most of their illustrations.
"Stretching Accounts Payables." Financial Rounds, June 14, 2008 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Also enjoy the Dilbert cartoons!

My friend, Sean, who taught
freshman composition and technical writing is a natural teacher. He brought his
real world corporate experience into the classroom, loved coming to work every
day and truly cared about everyone on his class roster. The students loved him.
He was rigorous, fair, and knowledgeable. He had a year-to-year full time
appointment, but no assurance of being rehired. Last week he packed his
briefcase for the last time, What a loss.
Beverly C. Lucey, "Migrants, Money, and Migraines: Headaches of the Adjunct
Professor," The Irascible Professor, May 20, 2008 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-06-05-08.htm

The Case Against the World Wide Web A provocative article in the forthcoming issue of
Atlantic Monthly argues that Web surfing is rewiring our brains, making us
unable to stay focused long enough to make it to the end of a book or long
article. To support his thesis, the author, Nicholas Carr, cites these scholars:
Bruce Friedman, of the University of Michigan Medical School; Maryanne Wolf, a
developmental psychologist at Tufts University; and James Olds, a professor of
neuroscience at George Mason University. Mr. Carr also mentions a report of
online research habits by scholars from University College London. A study by
the National Endowment for the Arts also seems to support Mr. Carr's argument.
The study, "To Read or Not to Read," showed, among other things, that the
portion of college graduates who were proficient in reading prose declined 23
percent from 1992 to 2003.Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of
Higher Education, June 12, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3085&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve
had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering
with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My
mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking
the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.
Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind
would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d
spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the
case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three
pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to
do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The
deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a
decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing
and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has
been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the
stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few
Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale
fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as
not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails,
scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to
podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to
which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related
works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a
universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through
my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access
to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been
widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,”
Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.”
But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan
pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of
information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the
process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my
capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in
information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of
particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the
surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles
with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many
say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more
they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the
bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who
writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped
reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a]
voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the
answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way
I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I
THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use
of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered
his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and
absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this
year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of
Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone
conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato”
quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from
many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted.
“I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or
four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still
await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will
provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a
recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars
from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of
a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research
program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of
visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library
and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal
articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that
people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from
one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already
visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or
book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a
long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually
read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in
the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading”
are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents
pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go
online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not
to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be
reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was
our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it
lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We
are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist
at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and
Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the
style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and
“immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of
deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press,
made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she
says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to
interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read
deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill
for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have
to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the
language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in
learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in
shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that
readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for
reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose
written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many
regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive
functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli.
We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be
different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Continued in article

Jensen CommentPeople generally
read some books for pure entertainment and the fast passage of time. With Agatha
Christie still being my favorite mystery writer, I read mystery books like
Agatha Christie might've written while I'm on airplanes and in hospital waiting
rooms and even while Erika shops. I read these without looking for embedded
messages other than learning about properties of some poisons if I ever did
undertake to commit murder

People read some books for the message, especially passages
from the Bible or Qur'an or biographies about great leaders or teachers like
Abraham Lincoln, Socrates, and Albert Einstein.

People read some classics for both entertainment and
embedded messages such as Moby Dick and the great books of Leo Tolstoy, although
I must admit that several times in my life I grew too weary of Tolstoy to ever
finish War and Peace. Often the benefits of the message are not worth the
wearying effort to wade through the verbiage. This is probably why even our best
writers often turn to short stories or magazine/journal articles or poems to
communicate their messages.

I don't blame the Internet for the decline in book reading
or the speed reading and scanning of books. The Internet is a fault only to the
extent that it is part of our frenetic lifestyles and the flood of information
from more and more books, articles, television, NetFlix DVDs, Blockbuster DVDs,
etc. Books have to compete with many newer alternatives aside from the Internet.
And our lifestyles just do not make it easy to find a few hours each day to read
a long book cover-to-cover. Admittedly part of the problem is the added time we
now devote to email messaging, blogs, online journals, podcasts, Webcasts, and
Bob Jensen's tidbits. But somehow I personally think I would be depriving myself
of much learning if I cut off my broadband cable and started working my way
through the classics or the endless stream of new, often poorly written,
so-called best sellers.

There's nothing sacrosanct about book reading in the
information age. Books must compete with other alternatives. And often books are
very worthwhile, although I must admit that I'm prone to speed reading and
scanning just like I was 50 years ago. There's more in Randy Pausch's new short
book than in his video speeches, television interviews, and most likely the
forthcoming movie about his life and death. Some books we just read to learn
more about what we can't find anywhere else. This makes books compete if they
contain more of what we are seeking. I'm not really seeking to learn more about
Barbara Walter's sex life, so I don't choose to read her autobiography. But
there are books that I seek out because I want to know more about particular
topics.

I find that the main advantage of a printed book is that I
like reading from hard copy rather than a computer screen and that I find books
to be better than any other alternative for perusing and scanning. I must admit
that I rarely, if ever, read every word in any book at any time. I guess this
goes with my Type A personality and aversion for wasting time even at things
like golf. There's a golf course on two sides of my property and a life-time
membership came with the purchase of my house. I've played a total of five holes
in five years up here in the mountains because there are better things to do
like spending ten hours a day on the Internet. Maybe there's something true
about "The Case Against the World Wide Web."

Perhaps my brain really has been altered by the WWW, at
least what's left of my aging brain!

Separately, with
advent of WWW, I am very interested in views this readership has on Distance Learning – including:
are there any distance learning programs to get a PhD in Accounting, are any
distance learning programs (undergrad/masters level) currently seeking
professionally qualified (PQ vs. AQ) instructors, and any thoughts on
ability of distance learning programs to provide quality education in
accounting or business generally as well as PhD programs specifically. I
joined Prof. Jensen’s listserv recently and I apologize if this topic was
previously covered.

Since there is such an enormous shortage of new PhDs in accounting,
sometimes doctoral graduates in other fields can get accounting tenure track
positions, especially when their theses make worthy contributions to
accounting research. But it’s important to remember that leading
universities can be pretty snobby when it comes to accounting tenure tracks.

And I might add that the AECM is not my listserv even though it may seem
like it at times.

Bob Jensen

June 16, 2008 reply from Jagdish Gangolly [gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU]

Bob,

I must disagree. I ind it amusing when such blanket
statements are made on a phenomenon before it is fully understood.

I think the web's advantages far outweigh its
disadvantages. Also, blaming the web for the follies of those who misuse it
is like blaming guns for murders.

I thought you'll find the following article in the
Forbes by Robert Metcalfe (inventor of the ethernet) interesting:

A big difference that has taken
place in the last 40 years is that when I started the typical working paper,
double-spaced, was 20 to 25 pages. But now they are 60 to 70 pages, and as I get
older and my eye sight deteriorates especially, I find this a terrible thing. I
wish people would put their ideas in a punchier, simpler way.
"An Interview with Avinash Dixit," Forthcoming in the Royal Economic
Society Newsletter ---
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/oswald/avinashdixit.pdf

Bulls make money Bears make money pigs get
slaughtered. — Posted by charles

God gave you eyes. Plagiarize. - quoted in Liar’s
Poker by Michael Lewis, Work smarter, not harder. — Posted by Shane

Don’t try to catch a falling knife The market can
stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. - Keynes

You only find out who is swimming naked when the
tide goes out. - Buffet — Posted by Broadway

“Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When
Others Are Fearful” — Warren Buffett

“Buy the rumor, sell the fact” — Posted by Phil

“Buy on the sound of the cannon, Sell on the sound
of the trumpet”, I read this quote in Ben Stein’s column on Yahoo Finance,
it’s a great blog (as is this one). — Posted by James Burden

“Trees don’t grow to the sky.”

“Even a dead cat
will bounce if it drops from high enough.”

“No one ever went broke taking profits.” — Posted
by Marton

“Even a dead cat can bounce” — Posted by Drew 9.

I remember an SNL skit after the ‘87 crash. It was
Wall Street Week with a guest named “Futureman” he had the best investing
mantra ever: “Read old newspapers, look at historic charts, go back in time,
buy low, sell high.” — Posted by Greg

The stock market is like a beauty contest. Don’t
pick the prettiest girl; Pick the one everyone else thinks is the prettiest.
(Keynes?) — Posted by Adam J. Fein

I like them in matched pairs: No one ever went
broke taking profits - sell you losers and let your winners ride. Don’t
fight the tape/the trend is your friend - buy when there is blood in the
streets. I would be surprised if there are any cliches that don’t have an
opposite. — Posted by ziggurat

“Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?” (Fred Schwed) —
Posted by DK1

From Keynes - In the long run, we’re all dead. —
Posted by John

Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered. — Posted by
Bylo Selhi

October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous
months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September,
April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February. (Mark
Twain) Those who live by numbers can also perish by them and it is a
terrifying thing to have an adding machine write an epitaph, either way.
(George J.W. Goodman) — Posted by Justin

Just to go with volume, a slight tweak to #2. Bears
make money; bulls make money; pigs lose their shirt. Which I like better
than slaughter, although now that I think on it, slaughter makes more sense
than fashion losing hogs. I thought there were more of these aphorisms. I
guess not. — Posted by Erika

Think big, think positive, never show any sign of
weakness. Always go for the throat. Buy low, sell high. Fear? That’s the
other guy’s problem. Nothing you have ever experienced will prepare you for
the absolute carnage you are about to witness. Super Bowl, World Series -
they don’t know what pressure is. In this building, it’s either kill or be
killed. You make no friends in the pits and you take no prisoners. One
minute you’re up half a million in soybeans and the next, boom, your kids
don’t go to college and they’ve repossessed your Bentley. Are you with me? —
Louis Winthorpe III — Posted by Sail Boffin

“For every cliche, there is an equal and opposite
cliche.” — Posted by zbicyclist

In 1963, when I was graduating from college, a book
was published entitled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by the
noted historian Richard Hofstadter. In exploring anti-intellectualism as a
major current of American culture, Hofstadter examined various facets of our
nation’s history over time. He described how those living in rural areas
grew suspicious of urban life. He analyzed how utilitarianism and
practicality, associated with the world of business, were accompanied by a
certain contempt for the life of the mind. He devoted special attention to
evangelicalism, although we should perhaps more specifically define his
target as fundamentalism, a literal-minded approach to the Bible that
involved hostility to all forms of knowledge that contradicted scripture or
sought to interpret it as a set of historical documents reflecting the
context of its production. He noted how all of this combined to make the
term “elite” a dirty word.

This exploration of American national character,
which was very much a product of his times, notably the atmosphere of fear
and distrust that characterized the Cold War, is still quite timely today.
Which is why I felt compelled to re-read Hofstadter’s book last summer. And
why I was particularly interested in reading an update and homage to
Hofstadter by Susan Jacoby, whose book The Age of American Unreason
was published just this year.

Jacoby brings Hofstadter’s arguments into the
present, illustrating them with examples from the times in which we live
today. She talks about the powerful role played by fundamentalist forms of
religion in current America; about the abysmal level of public education;
about the widespread inability to distinguish between science and
pseudoscience; about the dumbing-down of the media and politics; about the
consequences of a culture of serious reading being replaced by a rapid-fire,
short-attention-span-provoking, over-stimulating, largely visual,
information-spewing environment.

She, like Hofstadter, invites us to consider how
all of this has affected the great venture that is American democracy? So,
let us do so.

Once upon a time, the leaders of our country were
the kind of men — and, let’s face it, it was a men’s club at the time — who
were learned, who valued scholarship and science. The American Philosophical
Society, founded in 1743 at the instigation of Benjamin Franklin, counted
also among its early members presidents George Washington, John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

In adopting as its mission the promotion of “useful
knowledge”, the American Philosophical Society reflected a time in which the
sciences and the humanities were not divided from one another, and in which
there was no opposition between what we might now call pure and applied
science. What it did reflect was an opposition between Enlightenment values
of reason and empirical research, on the one hand, and what we might call
“faith based” beliefs, on the other. There were clergymen among the early
members of the APS, but they were those who felt that their religious
convictions did not stand in their way of their desire to be among the most
educated members of their society.

That was then. This is now: We have a president who
believes that “creation science” should be taught in our schools. As Jacoby
points out, we should understand “how truly extraordinary it [is] that any
American president would place himself in direct opposition to contemporary
scientific thinking.”

But let’s not just pin the tail on the elephant
here and pick only on the Republicans — or, to be more precise, on the
extreme right wing of the Republican party, since there are, after all
(though they may be increasingly hard to locate), moderate, thoughtful — one
might even say, liberal — Republicans.

Let’s look at the Democrats, at the nomination
fight we all followed – followed, it seems, since the early Pleistocene.
Here we had two candidates vying to run for President who had been educated
at institutions that are among the most distinguished in our country:
Wellesley, Yale, Columbia and Harvard. Both candidates were obviously highly
intelligent and knowledgeable. Yet both felt the need to play down their
claims to intellectuality — and the winner may still feel that need in the
general election. Hillary Clinton chugalugged beer and sought to attach the
dread label of “elitist” to her rival. And Barack Obama felt compelled to
follow one of the most honest and sophisticated political speeches in recent
memory with strenuous displays of folksiness.

And who are we to blame them? If anyone is going to
serve as president, the first step is to get elected. What level of
intellectual interest and background can political candidates presuppose on
the part of our nation’s citizenry? What level of interest in the most
important challenges facing us in the years ahead? What level of public
demand that assertions be backed up with sound reasoning and actual facts?

To take just one example: citing data from the Pew
Forum on Religion and Public Life, released in 2005, Jacoby notes that
two-thirds of Americans believe that both evolution and creationism should
be taught in our public schools. Who would have thought that, all these
years after the United States became the laughing stock of the civilized
world through international newspaper coverage of the Scopes trial, we would
still see the fight we have recently seen in the state of Pennsylvania over
teaching creationism in our public schools?

Nor is this simply a matter of religious belief.
Many who advocate teaching creationism do so in the name of providing a
“fair and balanced” curriculum. This misplaced pluralism, which draws no
distinction between the results of scientific inquiry and the content of
folk beliefs, is in line with the loose way in which the word “theory” is
used, such that Einstein’s “theory” of relativity or Darwin’s “theory” of
evolution is on a par with the loose way we use “theory” to describe any
kind of wild guess. In this latter sense, “theory” is used as the opposite
of “fact”, rather than as a systematic set of hypotheses to explain a
variety of facts. Moreover, simply changing the label from “creationism” to
“creation science” or “intelligent design” gives this set of untestable and
unfalsifiable assertions the veneer of science, which is quite enough for a
lot of people who have little or no sense of what real science is.

But let us not let the scientists and scholars
themselves off the hook. Jacoby devotes some interesting passages in her
book to forms of pseudo-science that were at various times in our history
embraced by members of the most educated classes. Back in the 19th and early
20th centuries, we had social Darwinism, which sought to justify differences
between rich and poor as a reflection of “survival of the fittest” (which,
by the way, was not an expression coined by Darwin). And lest we look upon
those benighted forebears too complacently, let us keep in mind that, much
more recently, we have had sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which
share many of the same faults, though in more sophisticated trappings, as
befits the trajectory of the natural and social sciences since the 19th
century unilinear evolutionism of Herbert Spencer and others.

Returning to the world of politics, the first
presidential candidate I campaigned for myself — I was 10 years old at the
time and we were having a mock convention in my elementary school (those
were the days when candidates actually got chosen at the party’s national
convention) — that first presidential candidate was the quintessential,
unelectable intellectual Adlai Stevenson, who ran against Dwight Eisenhower.
One of the well-known anecdotes about him is the time a woman went up to him
after a speech and said, “Mr. Stevenson, every thinking American will be
voting for you.” To which he replied, “Madam, that is not enough. I need a
majority.”

In her chapter on “Public Life”, which is subtitled
“Defining Dumbness Downward”, Jacoby opens by talking about the
extemporaneous speech given by Robert Kennedy on April 4th, 1968, when he
had just learned, before taking the stage in Indianapolis, that the Reverend
Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been assassinated in Memphis. Kennedy began
by invoking from memory the following lines from Aeschylus:

Even in our sleep, pain which we cannot forgetFalls drop by drop upon the heart,Until, in our own despair,Against our will,Comes wisdomThrough the awful grace of God.

Jacoby notes how inconceivable it is today that a
major political figure, an aspirant to the highest office in the land, would
use such a quote, given the pervasive fear nowadays of seeming to be an
“elitist.” Yet Robert Kennedy was not showing off to his audience or
condescending to them. He just assumed that he could address them in this
way, whether or not they themselves were familiar with these lines, much
less could quote them from memory.

Jacoby’s discussion of the dumbing down of our
public, political culture follows a chapter on what she calls “The Culture
of Distraction”. She worries over the consequences of our being constantly
bombarded by noisy stimuli, by invitations to multitask in a way that
fosters superficiality as opposed to depth. The major casualties of our
current media-saturated life are three things essential to the vocation of
an intellectual: silence, solitary thinking, and social conversation.

Continued in article

New Wiki Helps Humanities Researchers Find Online ToolsA new wiki provides a directory of online tools for
humanities scholars. The site, which uses software that lets anyone edit or add
to the material, covers more than 20 categories, including blogging tools,
specialized search engines for scholars, and software programs that can record
what is on a user's screen. The site, called Digital Research Tools, or DiRT, is
run by Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University. The
Center for History and New Media at George Mason University runs a similar
collection of resources called
Exploring and Collecting History Online, or ECHO.
Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3068&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Now you can write modules for Encyclopedia
Britannica (well sort of in their "not responsible" section)

Long a standard reference source for scholarship,
largely because of its tightly controlled editing, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica announcedthis week it was
throwing open its elegantly-bound covers to the masses. It will allow the "user
community" (in the words of the encyclopedia's blog) to contribute their own
articles, which will be clearly marked and run alongside the edited reference
pieces. This seems to be a response to the runaway success of the user-edited
online reference tool Wikipedia. (See
for yourself. Do a Web search on a topic and note whether Wikipedia or
Britannica shows up first.) Scholars have been adamantly opposed to Wikipedia
citations in academic papers because the authors and sources are always
changing. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder, agrees with this, but in next
week's issue of The Chronicle (click back to our home page on Monday for more)
he also points to some changes in the reference tool that may make it more
palatable to scholars. At Britannica, "readers and users will also be invited
into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannica’s site
under their own names," the encyclopedia's blog explains. But it's not a
complete free-for-all. The voice of Britannica adds that the core encyclopedia
itself "will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and
will bear the imprimatur 'Britannica Checked' to distinguish it from material on
the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible."
Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3064&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
This might be the wave of the future for academic research journals. In a
journal's online archives could be those "set in stone" reviewed articles given
a blue ribbon. Then there could be the "open source communications" for
contributions that are edited and revised by the world in general. The academic
community will ultimately have to judge whether two or three editor-assigned
(anonymous) reviewers have more cost-benefit to scholarship than the entire
world of (signed) reviewers.

Question
Are refereed journals set in stone for the academy's tenure and performance
evaluations in the age of newer technology?

Academe has been slow to accept new forms of
scholarship like blogs, wikis, and video clips, according to a report
released last week that examines emerging technology trends in higher
education. The
Horizon Report 2007predicts that in four to five
years, academe will accept as scholarship this kind of interactive online
material and will develop methods for evaluating it.
The document notes that the change serves to encourage the public to
participate in the production of research and scholarly works. An author who
posts a draft of his or her book online, for example, can receive immediate
feedback on ways to improve the work, the report states. The document was
developed by Educause and the
New Media Consortium, two higher-education technology groups.

The report also concludes that within one year,
social-networking sites will be widely used in teaching and learning, and
that mobile phones and virtual worlds will be used in this way in two to
three years.

Western Governors University,
which was founded in 1997 as a collaboration of colleges in 19 states offering
online programs, was for many years known for not meeting the ambitious goals of
its founders. Projected to attract thousands of students within a few years, it
initially attracted but scores of students. But the university has been growing
lately, and on Wednesday announced that
enrollment has hit 10,000, including students from
all 50 states. Inside Higher Ed, June 5, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/05/qt

Jensen Comment
Some of the things that made WGU controversial were as follows:

Before spreading to other states it was sponsored by
four governors largely concerned with reducing the cost and increasing the
availability of higher education;

It went online before online tools were as developed as
they are today, and online learning was not yet accepted by most educators
or students;

It acquired an early reputation for being career
focused, which often riles humanities departments --- many educators
appeared to predict and enjoy the life-threatening struggles of WGU;

It was and is still a competency-based program that
takes much of the subjectivity of grading and graduation out of the hands of
instructors who traditionally have the option of fudging grades for such
things as effort.

WGU now has many undergraduate and graduate degree
programs, including those in traditional fields of business such as accounting,
marketing, etc. ---
http://www.wgu.edu/

Judith Boettcher in Syllabus, June 1999, 18-24 Judith
Boettcher is affiliated with CREN. She predicts the following scenarios (which
appear to be heavily in line with the emerging WGU programs mentioned above):

1. A "career university" sector
will be in place (with important partnerships of major corporations with
prestige universities).

2. Most higher education institutions, perhaps 60
percent, will have teaching and learning management
software systems linked to their back office administration systems.

3. New career universities will focus on
certifications, modular degrees, and skill sets.

4. The link between courses
and content for courses will be broken.

5. Faculty work and roles will make a dramatic shift
toward specialization (with less stress upon
one person being responsible for the learning material in an entire course).
(Outsourcing Academics
http://www.outsourcing-academics.com/ )

Will Universities Be Relics? What Happens When an Irresistible
Force Meets an Immovable Object? John W. Hibbs

Peter Drucker predicts that,
in 30 years, the traditional university will be nothing more than a relic.
Should we listen or laugh? Hibbs examines Drucker's prophesy in the light of
other unbelievable events, including the rapid transformation of the Soviet
Union "from an invincible Evil Empire into just another meek door-knocker at
International Monetary Fund headquarters." Given the mobility and cost
concerns of today's students, as well as the growing tendency of employers
to evaluate job-seekers' competencies rather than their institutional
affiliations, Hibbs agrees that the
brick-and-mortar university is doomed to extinction.

Question
How do for-profit-colleges and universities differ fundamentally from
traditional colleges and universities?

At the
beginning of their new book on for-profit higher education,
William G. Tierney and Guilbert C. Hentschke talk about the
academic division between “lumpers” and “splitters,” the former
focused on examining different entities or phenomena as
variations on a theme and the latter focused on classifying
entities or phenomena as truly distinct. In
New Players, Different Game: Understanding the Rise of
For-Profit Colleges and Universities,just published by Johns Hopkins University
Press, Tierney and Hentschke consider the ways for-profit
colleges are part of or distinct from the rest of higher
education. Tierney and Hentschke are professors at the Rossier
School of Education at the University of Southern California,
where Tierney is also director of the Center for Higher
Education Policy Analysis. They responded to questions via
e-mail about their new book . . . For-profits are not,
technically, just a ‘technology.’ But they do function in a
manner that is radically different from the manner in which
traditional postsecondary institutions function. For-profits,
like their traditional brethren, come in many shapes and sizes —
some are gigantic (such as the University of Phoenix) and others
are small barber’s colleges. What differentiates them from
traditional institutions is that they have a different
decision-making model, different ways to develop and deliver the
model, and different ways to measure success. The point is not
that all for-profits utilize distance learning (because they do
not), but that they eschew the established norms of the academy
and pursue success in quite different ways.
Scott Jaschik, "New Players, Different Game," Inside Higher
Education, August 30, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/30/forprofit

Investing in
for-profit colleges is often considered a haven during a
rocky economy. But turmoil in the student-loan market could
add a hint of uncertainty to Grand Canyon Education Inc.'s
plans for an initial public offering of stock this year.

The company,
which acquired 55-year-old Grand Canyon University in 2004
and converted it from a traditional nonprofit
bricks-and-mortar college to a school that also offers
online degrees, registered last month with the Securities
and Exchange Commission to raise as much as $230 million in
an IPO.

Based in
Phoenix, the company hasn't set a price range, share size or
date yet for its offering, which it plans to list on the
Nasdaq Stock Market under the trading symbol LOPE.

Smart Money?

Many of
Grand Canyon's public peers -- Strayer Education Inc., which
operates Strayer University; Capella Education Co.; and
American Public Education Inc. -- have been trending higher
since hitting 2008 lows in March. Capella rose 26% on its
first day of trading in November 2006 and is now more than
triple its $20 IPO price, while American Public Education
rose 80% on its first day in November, the third-best debut
of 2007, and is up about 78% from its $20 IPO price.

Apollo Group
Inc., which operates the University of Phoenix, hasn't shown
the same upward trend as its peers since March; late that
month the company reported earnings for its second quarter,
ended Feb. 29, that missed analysts' estimates.

"There's an
association between increased unemployment figures and
increasing enrollment of adults in postsecondary schools,"
says Richard Garrett, program director and senior research
analyst for education research and consulting firm
Eduventures. "The underlying story for these firms remains
positive."

Colleges
that offer an online-degree component are viewed in an
especially positive light, according to Mr. Garrett and
other industry watchers, because it is easier and more
economical to expand their programs.

Earlier IPO

Grand Canyon
isn't alone in its interest in tapping the public markets;
earlier this year, Education Management Corp. filed to
return to the public markets after going private in 2006.

What's less
clear is how the student-loan environment will fare in the
future.

Lower demand
among debt investors for student-loan securities, combined
with a new law that cut the subsidies student-loan issuers
get on Federal Family Education Loans, has caused some
lenders to leave the market and others to pare back.

"This summer
will be zero hour for determining whether the loan market in
its current form will be able to serve students adequately,
or whether there is further uncertainty on the horizon. The
bulk of students will be receiving their loans in June and
July," says Jessica Lee, an investment banker at Rittenhouse
Capital Partners, which specializes in education and
technology.

Ms. Lee
believes that the for-profit education market should remain
strong because of economic conditions and investors' flight
to safety; most for-profit schools have low debt levels,
along with high profit margins and free cash flow.

Do you know whether there are there any data how
recruiters view this degree? That is, How many of them get job?

June 5, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen

If WGU was a dead end on a career path and a graduate school path, it is
doubtful that it would continue to grow at these rates. Certainly it will do
better in some disciplines than other disciplines. The MBA and some K-12
teacher prospects are bleak at the moment for many programs these days but
accounting firms are hiring.

WGU had a drawn out battle for accreditation because it was so different.
But it achieved accreditation. It is now the only accredited
competency-based program in the United States.

Students should also be able to sit for the CPA examination in the states
that are supporting WGU. Online programs typically have greater problems
with dropout for a number of pretty well known reasons. Also education is
not ideal in the sense of socialization of the students vis-à-vis onsite
students.

WGU is apparently filling a need, and I think accounting recruiters will
hire good students from most any accredited programs that graduate students
who qualify to sit for the CPA examination. MBA programs have lost their
appeal in some respects as states tightened up requirements to sit for the
CPA examination.

Some online programs are graduating duds, but WGU is not one of these
programs. To the contrary, its competency-based grading makes WGU relatively
tough.

I like WGU because in didn't get out of the kitchen when it got hot both
in the snobbish academy and in state legislatures. It hung in there and
stayed true to its mission and standards. The same thing happened to the
competency based CASB in Canada which also hung in there as a graduate
school with high standards --- http://www.casb.com/

The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for
more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about
the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions
market themselves, and the demise of
the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to
take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the
plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting
through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom --
and her final grade --
in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter. Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) ---
http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/

My first comment pertains to faculty acceptance of
distance learning. I'm for it, but I've never done it. Administrators at my
university would love to do it as it is viewed as a source of additional
students and revenue. However, the predominant faculty view across the
university is to view Internet-based distance education with much
skepticism. And, I'm surprised. If a common perception is that
Internet-based distance education is predominantly asynchronous (mostly from
prof to student), then how does that differ from to many local classrooms
where heavy use of overhead and PowerPoint projectors raise room
temperatures.

Second, there is a quote in which it is said that
there has been a paradigm shift in how people learn. I fear this is not the
case. How people learn is a function of our physical and mental humanity.
Affection, as influenced by environmental/societal factors, has an impact on
the degree of learning. My personal view, unsubstantiated by research, is
that the influence of societal/environmental factors is not huge. What this
means is that the ability of students to learn from lectures isn't all that
different today than it was when we were all much younger. Students today
might be less inclined (than we were) to like being lectured to and as a
result decide to learn less. But I don't think so.

As a result of decades of research, the processes
by which people learn is better understood. As a result, there has been a
paradigm shift in instructional approaches and strategies to more
effectively assist students in the learning process.

Third, I wonder about faculty compensation at a
school like Phoenix. We all know that full-time, terminally qualified
faculty can earn $100,000+ at AACSB schools, and less (but not too much
less) at non-AACSB schools. Is the compensation as high for full-time
on-line teaching? If so, this might be a viable way for faculty to continue
their careers.

David Albrecht
Bowling Green

June 13, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

Except for some disadvantaged students who cannot easily attend onsite
classes (e.g., due to handicaps, full-time jobs, distances to campus,
single-parent constraints, etc.), distance learning can make a somewhat nice
mix with onsite learning. For example, a student in a wheelchair might be
able to attend one or two courses in a classroom two days a week when it's
really a burden to attend five courses in classrooms each week.

But what many of our luddite faculty fail to appreciate is the learning
advantages of online learning, especially online learning like courses
taught by Amy Dunbar with daily instant messaging and much more
communication with instructors and classmates than takes place in onsite
courses.

The SCALE experiments at the University of Illinois dramatically
demonstrated that for certain types of online courses with really hard
working online instructors, online learning is likely to be better than
onsite learning from the same instructors ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

Onsite courses have a lot of advantages, especially for immature students
in need of more structure, face-to-face guidance, and socialization with
other students.

Online courses have the advantage of less wasted time such as the time
needed to get to class, start up a class, and incidental time wasters in
class. It is also very hard to get student teams together face-to-face
because of complicated logistics and schedules. It's much easier to get
student teams together online, and this in most instances makes team
learning both more efficient and more effective online.

Asynchronous learning, in my opinion, is vastly superior to synchronous
learning, although a lot of good things can happen in good case-method and
lecture courses.

I think most accounting students learn more asynchronously from their
textbooks and homework than they do in lectures. What good lectures and good
cases do in synchronous settings is inspire --- and that is very, very
important. What asynchronous learning does is allow students to pace their
concentration and learning as well as repeat, repeat, and repeat some more
until they finally see the light. Practice makes perfect more than any other
aspect of learning.

Hence, even in ideal circumstances with full-time resident students it is
probably better to mix online with onsite courses rather than consider
onsite learning superior in all instances with full-time students.

Many faculty hate online courses because, when done properly with lots of
communication, they are much, much harder to teach. Of course instructors
can cheat by discouraging one-on-one student interaction just as some
faculty sometimes get away with in their lecture courses.

I always remember an economics professor at Michigan State University
years ago who taught via television piped to classrooms around the campus.
His TAs administered examinations and communicated face-to-face students. Al
was a TV star who literally spent about three ours per week for each class.
He thought it was the best teaching assignment on campus. The only thing he
had to interact with was a camera. In fairness the students could push a
button and ask questions during a class, but they tended not to do so and
could've tied up the TV class if each of over 1,000 students out there
wanted to push his/her button to talk.

Mostly I
think students slept and daydreamed while supposedly watching Big Al. He did
do some things that attracted attention like take off his shirt and teach in
his undershirt. But I don't think that contributed a whole lot to learning.

Bob Jensen

Soaring Popularity of E-Learning Among Students But Not Faculty
How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college
in Fall 2005?

More students are taking online college courses than
ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept
of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest
association of organizations and institutions focused on online education . . .
‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ Elia Powers, "Growing Popularity of E-Learning, Inside Higher Ed,
November 10, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online

More students are taking online college courses
than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the
concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s
largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online
education.

Roughly 3.2 million students took at least one
online course from a degree-granting institution during the fall 2005 term,
the Sloan Consortium said. That’s double the number who reported doing so in
2002, the first year the group collected data, and more than 800,000 above
the 2004 total. While the number of online course participants has increased
each year, the rate of growth slowed from 2003 to 2004.

The report, a joint partnership between the group
and the College Board, defines online courses as those in which 80 percent
of the content is delivered via the Internet.

The Sloan Survey of Online Learning,
“Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006,”shows that 62 percent of chief academic officers say
that the learning outcomes in online education are now “as good as or
superior to face-to-face instruction,” and nearly 6 in 10 agree that
e-learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.”
Both numbers are up from a year ago.

Researchers at the Sloan Consortium, which is
administered through Babson College and Franklin W. Olin College of
Engineering, received responses from officials at more than 2,200 colleges
and universities across the country. (The report makes few references to
for-profit colleges, a force in the online market, in part because of a lack
of survey responses from those institutions.)

Much of the report is hardly surprising. The bulk
of online students are adult or “nontraditional” learners, and more than 70
percent of those surveyed said online education reaches students not served
by face-to-face programs.

What stands out is the number of faculty who still
don’t see e-learning as a valuable tool. Only about one in four academic
leaders said that their faculty members “accept the value and legitimacy of
online education,” the survey shows. That number has remained steady
throughout the four surveys. Private nonprofit colleges were the least
accepting — about one in five faculty members reported seeing value in the
programs.

Elaine Allen, co-author of the report and a Babson
associate professor of statistics and entrepreneurship, said those numbers
are striking.

“As a faculty member, I read that response as, ‘We
didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ ” Allen said.
“It’s a very hard adjustment. We sat in lectures for an hour when we were
students, but there’s a paradigm shift in how people learn.”

Barbara Macaulay, chief academic officer at UMass
Online, which offers programs through the University of Massachusetts, said
nearly all faculty members teaching the online classes there also teach
face-to-face courses, enabling them to see where an online class could fill
in the gap (for instance, serving a student who is hesitant to speak up in
class).

She said she isn’t surprised to see data
illustrating the growing popularity of online courses with students, because
her program has seen rapid growth in the last year. Roughly 24,000 students
are enrolled in online degree and certificate courses through the university
this fall — a 23 percent increase from a year ago, she said.

“Undergraduates see it as a way to complete their
degrees — it gives them more flexibility,” Macaulay said.

The Sloan report shows that about 80 percent of
students taking online courses are at the undergraduate level. About half
are taking online courses through community colleges and 13 percent through
doctoral and research universities, according to the survey.

Nearly all institutions with total enrollments
exceeding 15,000 students have some online offerings, and about two-thirds
of them have fully online programs, compared with about one in six at the
smallest institutions (those with 1,500 students or fewer), the report
notes. Allen said private nonprofit colleges are often set in enrollment
totals and not looking to expand into the online market.

The report indicates that two-year colleges are particularly willing to be
involved in online learning.

“Our institutions tend to embrace changes a little
more readily and try different pedagogical styles,” said Kent Phillippe, a
senior research associate at the American Association of Community Colleges.
The report cites a few barriers to what it calls the “widespread adoption of
online learning,” chief among them the concern among college officials that
some of their students lack the discipline to succeed in an online setting.
Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents defined that as a barrier.

Allen, the report’s co-author, said she thinks that
issue arises mostly in classes in which work can be turned in at any time
and lectures can be accessed at all hours. “If you are holding class in real
time, there tends to be less attrition,” she said. The report doesn’t
differentiate between the live and non-live online courses, but Allen said
she plans to include that in next year’s edition.

Few survey respondents said acceptance of online
degrees by potential employers was a critical barrier — although liberal
arts college officials were more apt to see it as an issue.

One reason why might be what I have seen. The
in residence accounting students that I talk with take online classes
here because they are EASY and do not take much work. This would be very
popular with students but not generally so with faculty.

John

November 10, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi John,

Then there is a quality control problem whereever this is a fact. It
would be a travesty if any respected college had two or more categories of
academic standards or faculty assignments.

Variations in academic standards have long been a problem between
part-time versus full-time faculty, although grade inflation can be higher
or lower among part-time faculty. In one instance, it’s the tenure-track
faculty who give higher grades because they're often more worried about
student evaluations. At the opposite extreme it is part-time faculty who
give higher grades for many reasons that we can think of if we think about
it.

One thing that I'm dead certain about is that highly motivated students
tend to do better in online courses ceteris paribus. Reasons are mainly that
time is used more efficiently in getting to class (no wasted time driving or
walking to class), less wasted time getting teammates together on team
projects, and fewer reasons for missing class.

My opinions on learning advantages of E-Learning were heavily influenced
by the most extensive and respected study of online versus onsite learning
experiments in the SCALE experiments
using full-time resident students at the University of Illinois ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

In the SCALE experiments cutting across 30 disciplines, it was generally
found that motivated students learned better online then their onsite
counterparts having the same instructors. However, there was no significant
impact on students who got low grades in online versus onsite treatment
groups.

I think the main problem with faculty is that online teaching tends to
burn out instructors more frequently than onsite instructors. This was also
evident in the SCALE experiments. When done correctly, online courses are
more communication intent between instructors and faculty. Also, online
learning takes more preparation time if it is done correctly.

My hero for online learning is still Amy Dunbar who
maintains high standards for everything:

Also why many times it is not done 'right'. Not
done right they do not get the same education. Students generally do not
complain about getting 'less for their money'. Since we do not do online
classes in department the ones the students are taking are the university
required general education and our students in particular are not unhappy
with being shortchanged in that area as they frequently would have preferred
none anyway.

The University of Phoenix is often derided by
traditional academics for caring more about its bottom line than about
academic quality, and every year, the annual report issued by its parent
company focuses more on profits than student performance.

The institution that has become the largest private
university in North America is releasing its first "Annual Academic Report,"
which it will make available on itsWeb sitetoday.The university's leaders say the
findings show that its educational model is effective in helping students
succeed in college, especially those who are underprepared.

Freshmen at the University of Phoenix enter with
reading, writing, and mathematical skills that are, on average, below those
of other college students, but according to data from standardized tests,
Phoenix students appear to improve in those skills at a greater rate than do
students at other colleges.

And in a comparison of students who enter college
with "risk factors" that often contribute to their dropping out, Phoenix's
rates of completion for a bachelor's degree were substantially higher than
for institutions over all.

William J. Pepicello, president of the
330,000-student university, said those and other findings shared in advance
with The Chronicle show that the 32-year-old, open-access institution
is fulfilling its goals.

"This ties into our social mission for our
university," said Mr. Pepicello, in an interview at the company's
headquarters here. "We take these students and we do give them a significant
increase in skills."

Phoenix for years has been extensively measuring
and monitoring student progress for internal purposes, using the data to
change the content and design of its courses or to reshape its approach to
remedial education.

It decided to develop and publish this
report—distinct from the financial reports that its parent company, the
$2.6-billion Apollo Group Inc., regularly provides—as "a good-faith attempt
on our part" to show the university's commitment to growing public demand
for more accountability by institutions of higher education, said Mr.
Pepicello.

He and other university leaders fully expect some
challenges to the findings, but they say the institution, by publishing the
report, is showing its willingness to confront scrutiny of its educational
record from within academe. "It lets us, in a public forum, talk to our
colleagues about what we do and how well we do it," said Mr. Pepicello.

The introduction this academic year of a test that
could be administered to both campus-based and distance-education
students—the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress exam by the
Educational Testing Service—also made this kind of reporting possible, he
said. Nearly two-thirds of Phoenix students attend online.

Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center
for Public Policy and Higher Education, said that although he had not yet
seen Phoenix's data, its decision to publish such a report was "a very
positive development."

He has urged colleges to be open in their reporting
on themselves. Even if the university has chosen to release data that put it
in the best light, as others often do, Mr. Callan said the report will be a
significant piece of the national debate over what value an institution can
add to a student.

"For higher education, it is a positive and useful
and constructive approach," Mr. Callan said. Publication of the report, he
added, was in line with other efforts by the university "to be part of the
discussion on the outcomes of higher education." Those efforts include the
university's recent creation of a research center on adult learners (for
which Mr. Callan is an unpaid adviser).

A Mixed Report Card

In the report, some of those outcomes look better
than others.

"It certainly is not perfect," said Mr. Pepicello
of some of the test scores. "It is where we are."

In its report, Phoenix shows the results from its
1,966 students who took the MAPP test this year, compared with the national
sample of more than 376,000 students from about 300 institutions.

The results show that in reading, critical
thinking, and writing, its freshmen scored below those of the population
over all, but the difference between those scores and those of its seniors
was greater than for the population at large. The difference was more marked
in mathematics, although the university's freshmen and seniors' scores were
both notably lower than those of the whole test-taking pool.

Bill Wynne, MAPP test product specialist, said that
without knowing more about the makeup of the comparative samples and other
information, he could not characterize the statistical significance of the
gains the university was reporting, except that they were at least as good
as those reported by the national cross section. "The magnitude of the
change is in the eye of the beholder," he said.

Mr. Pepicello said he wished the seniors' scores
were higher, particularly in math, but he considered all of the findings
positive because they indicated that students improve when they attend.
"This doesn't embarrass me," he said. "This is really good information for
us to really improve our institution."

(Phoenix did not track the progress of individual
students, but MAPP officials said the university's pool of freshmen and
seniors taking the test was large enough and random enough to justify its
using different groups of students for comparisons.)

In another test, involving a smaller pool of
students, the Phoenix students' "information literacy" skills for such tasks
as evaluating sources and understanding economic, legal, and social issues
were also comparable to or significantly higher than the mean scores in
several categories. Adam Honea, the provost, said the findings from the
Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills test, developed at
Kent State University, were important to the institution since "information
literacy is a goal of ours."

Continued in article

As you might expect, this report triggered a lots of
debate, humor, and cynicism in the Chronicle of Higher Education ---
Click Here

Gone are the days when B-schoolers
had the luxury of choosing from among a half-dozen internships or job offers. As
the Class of 2008 prepares to graduate, an uncertain business climate is forcing
students to make difficult career choices that could have long-term economic
consequences. A growing body of research on both MBAs and undergrads suggests
that graduating into an economic downturn will substantially reduce lifetime
earnings—in some cases by millions of dollars.
Louis Lavelle, Business Week, April 3, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_15/b4079059579345.htm

I
do not pretend to be an expert of any sort on the complicated global warming
controversy. I do not view any of these points as reasons not to try to suppress
carbon emission within affordable global initiatives. The dispute centers around
what’s “affordable.”

Our planet has been slowly warming since last
emerging from the "Little Ice Age" of the 17th century, often associated
with the Maunder Minimum. Before that came the "Medieval Warm Period", in
which temperatures were about the same as they are today. Both of these
climate phenomena are known to have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, but
several hundred years prior to the present, the majority of the Southern
Hemisphere was primarily populated by indigenous peoples, where science and
scientific observation was limited to non-existent. Thus we can not say that
these periods were necessarily "global". However, "Global Warming" in recent
historical times has been an undisputable fact, and no one can reasonably
deny that.

But we're hearing far too often that the "science"
is "settled", and that it is mankind's contribution to the natural CO2 in
the atmosphere has been the principal cause of an increasing "Greenhouse
Effect", which is the root "cause" of global warming. We're also hearing
that "all the world's scientists now agree on this settled science", and it
is now time to quickly and most radically alter our culture, and prevent a
looming global catastrophe. And last, but not least, we're seeing a sort of
mass hysteria sweeping our culture which is really quite disturbing.
Historians ponder how the entire nation of Germany could possibly have
goose-stepped into place in such a short time, and we have similar unrest.
Have we become a nation of overnight loonies?

Sorry folks, but we're not exactly buying into the
Global Hysteria just yet. We know a great deal about atmospheric physics,
(bio) and from the onset, many of the claims were just plain fishy. The
extreme haste with which seemingly the entire world immediately accepted the
idea of Anthropogenic ( man-made ) Global Warming made us more than a little
bit suspicious that no one had really taken a close look at the science. We
also knew that the catch-all activity today known as "Climate Science" was
in its infancy, and that atmospheric modeling did not and still does not
exist which can predict changes in the weather or climate more than about a
day or two in advance.

So the endless stream of dire predictions of what
was going to happen years or decades from now if we did not drastically
reduce our CO2 production by virtually shutting down the economies of the
world appeared to be more the product of radical political and environmental
activism rather than science. Thus, we embarked on a personal quest for more
information, armed with a strong academic background in postgraduate physics
and a good understanding of the advanced mathematics necessary in such a
pursuit. This fundamental knowledge of the core principles of matter and its
many exceptionally complex interactions allowed us to research and
understand the foundations of many other sciences. In short, we read complex
scientific articles in many other scientific disciplines with relative ease
and good understanding - like most folks read comic books.

As our own knowledge of "climate science" grew, so
grew our doubts over the "settled science". What we found was the science
was far from "settled".. in fact it was barely underway.

It was for a while a somewhat lonely quest, what
with "all the world's scientists" apparently having no doubt. Finally, in
December 2007 we submitted an article to one of our local newspapers, the
Addison Independent, thinking they would be delighted in having at minimum
an alternative view of the issue. Alas, they chose not to publish it, but
two weeks after our submission (by the strangest coincidence), published yet
another "pro-global-warming" feature written by an individual whom, to the
best we could determine, had no advanced training in any science at all,
beyond self-taught it would appear. Still, the individual had published a
number of popular books on popular environmental issues, was well-loved by
those of similar political bent, and was held in high esteem among his
peers. We had learned a valuable lesson: Popular Journalists trump coupled
sets of 2nd-order partial differential equations every time. Serious science
doesn't matter if you have the press in your pocket.

In fairness to the Addison Independent and its
editors, our article was somewhat lengthy and technical, and presumably the
average reader most likely could not follow or even be interested in an
alternative viewpoint, since everyone knew by now that the global warming
issue was "settled science". And we confess that we like the paper,
subscribe to it, and know a number of folks who work there personally.
They're all good folks, and they have every right to choose what does or
doesn't go in their publication. They also have a right to spin the news any
direction they choose, because that's what freedom of the press is all
about. Seems everyone, both left and right, does it - and it's almost
certain we will be accused of doing the same here. And we just may be, as
hard as we may try to avoid it. We humans aren't all shaped by the same
cookie cutter, and that's a blessing that has taken us as a species to the
top of the food chain.

But by then we had been sharing our own independent
research of the literature with others via email, and receiving a surprising
amount of agreement back in return. (We're in contact with a large number of
fellow scientists around the country, dating back to our college days in the
17th century when beer was a quarter a bottle). One local friend, in
particular, kept pressing us to publish, and even offered to set up a
"debate" with the Popular Journalist who had usurped our original article.
This we politely declined, arguing that "debate" cannot prove or disprove
science...science must stand on its own.

But then something unusual happened. On Dec. 13,
2007, 100 scientists jointly signed an Open Letter to Ban Ki-Moon,
Secretary-General of the United Nations, requesting they cease the man-made
global warming hysteria and settle down to helping mankind better prepare
for natural disasters. The final signature was from the President of the
World Federation of Scientists.

At last, we were not alone...

We decided to publish the results of our
counter-exploration on the internet - but in a somewhat uniquely different
fashion. Knowing that most folks aren't geeks, and may have little
understanding of science or math, we're going to attempt to teach some of
the essential physics and such as we go along. Readers with little or no
mathematical or scientific training may find it challenging, but if you have
a general understanding of introductory college or even solid high school
level chemistry or physics, you should have no problem in following this
amazing tale. The brighter readers, even without a science background,
should be able to follow, as well. Smart folks learn faster than most.

Much of
the information on the test is correct... but facts out of context can often
mislead!

I have
strong issues with several questions on those grounds:

Question 3 asks what the main cause of global warming is, and gives 3 possible
choices. There are two major problems here. First the question is time
dependent. Second, several "main" causes aren't even listed as possibilities.
Some examples: If I ask what the main cause of the warming that has
occurred over the last 18,000 years is, the answer is Milankovitch orbital
variations (which include more than the "eccentricities" listed in answer b),
but if I ask what the main cause of global warming was in the late Mesozoic, the
answer is CO2 released by tectonic activity. If I ask what the main cause of
global warming was between 1992 and 1999, the answer is the diminishing effects
of the SO2 released by the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. And if I ask what is the main
cause of global warming has been over the past two centuries, the answer is
increasing atmospheric greenhouse gasses, some of which are human produced.
Although the author discusses many of these causes on his answer page, clearly
understanding relative time scales and interactions go way beyond his simplistic
multiple choices.

Question 5 implies that something less than 1 degree C is negligible... but
continuous changes of this magnitude in overall global averages implies that
polar high temps are increasing more... since hotter equatorial regions stay
relatively the same. This may be insignificant to the author, but ask a polar
bear!

Question 6 implies that just because CO2 has been higher in the geologic past
means we don't need to worry about current trends. This ignores two significant
issues. First, solar output was much different in the past. Second, rate of
change is more important for ecosystems than absolute changes. It took millions
of years for CO2 to rise in the mid Mesozoic... not several centuries. Berner's
data without error bars is also a bit misleading.

Question 7 has only simplistic answers. Sure, trees love CO2. But things we love
can hurt us. Eat too many Twinkies and you die of clogged arteries. While
forests like the CO2, individual species can't necessarily adapt to rapid
climate changes. Your grandchildren won't see any Sugar Maples in New England,
despite their use of CO2.

Question 9 depends on how one defines drastic. And check out the Oregon
Institute of Science and Medicine...

Question 10 is simplistic... all three means are important to determining how
the Earth is changing. To say that high altitude temps are the only important
measure is absurd. What is worse, the answer page still hawks the line that
satellite data shows decreasing temperatures. This is well known error in early
analyses that NASA has repudiated.

So the
upshot is that there are many truths in this quiz. But that are presented along
with untruths, and half truths in order to support a particular viewpoint.
Whether that viewpoint is right or wrong is unimportant. Science must not seek
to prove a point. That is what faith is for.

You may remember Ana Unruh, Trinity's first (and so far only) Rhodes
Scholar. She is now a Senior Policy advisor for the House Select Committee
on Energy Independence and Global Warming (she is also now Ana Unruh Cohen).
She likes to point out that climate models now been shown to be very
accurate over the last 10-12 years but many politicians are unwilling to
accept them, but the same politicians are willing to budget based on
economic models that have much less basis in theory and much worse track
records for predictive capability.

Sixty-nine percent of university research libraries
plan to increase spending
(this is a vague statistic since they don't indicate a starting benchmark)
on e-books over the next two years, according to a
recent study published by
Primary Research Group Inc.This finding and others
were based on a survey of 45 research libraries in countries around the world,
including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan.Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 30, 2008
---
Click Here

Henshaw "examines factors likely to influence
technology adoption within U.S. higher education over the next 30 years and
their impact on education providers and consumers." [Editor's note: the
author of this paper is my colleague at UNC-Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and
Learning division.]

Innovate: Journal of Online Education [ISSN
1552-3233], an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, is published
bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova
Southeastern University.

The journal focuses on the creative use of
information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic,
commercial, and governmental settings.
For more information, contact James L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief;
email: innovate@nova.edu ; Web:

How open access and interactive Web 2.0
applications are changing the learning environment is focus of the latest
issue of ELEARNING PAPERS.

The papers' authors consider the impact of these
technologies both on individual learners and the institutions that
facilitate the learning process. Papers include:

"Web 2.0 and New Learning Paradigms" by Antonio
Bartolome

"This article is sceptic about the current changes
at eLearning institutions and businesses, but points out some of the changes
that will take place outside their courses and programmes."

"Universities and Web 2.0: Institutional
Challenges" by Juan Freire

"Teachers, researchers and students started some
years ago to use social software tools, but in few cases these experiences
have allowed any scaling from the individual to the institutional level. The
promises and potential of web 2.0 in universities need an adequate strategy
for their development which has to confront the bottlenecks and fears common
in these institutions, which could explain the lack of adaptation."

"Is the world open?" by Richard Straub

"The rise of social networking sites, virtual
worlds, blogs, wikis and 3D Internet give us a first idea of the potential
of the 'interactive and collaborative web' dubbed Web 2.0. Now we have the
infrastructure and tools to operate in new ways in open systems. While many
of the thoughts about openness and the need for more open social systems
have been around for some time, this new infrastructure and new tools
accelerate the movement."

eLearning Papers [ISSN 1887-1542] is an open access
journal created as part of the elearningeuropa.info portal. The portal is
"an initiative of the European Commission to promote the use of multimedia
technologies and Internet at the service of education and training."

"Critical theory designates a philosophy and a
research methodology that focuses on the interrelated issues of technology,
politics and social change. Despite its emphasis on technology, critical
theory arguably remains underutilized in areas of practical research that
lie at the confluence of social, political and technological concerns, such
as the study of the use of the usability of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) or of their use in educational institutions."

Ubiquity [ISSN 1530-2180] is a free, Web-based
publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "dedicated to
fostering critical analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to
the nature, constitution, structure, science, engineering, technology,
practices, and paradigms of the IT profession." For more information,
contact: Ubiquity, email:
ubiquity@acm.org ;
Web:

Jonathan Zittrain:
Android will be a good bellwether for my thesis that we're drifting
towards locked down or vendor-controlled environments. If Android takes
off, I'm wrong (but relieved!): it'll roughly fit the pattern of the
Internet swamping the old AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy.

But without a new
architecture for dealing with bad code, I worry that Android will be
limited in how far it can go; there's a reason why the iPhone is so
popular, and part of it has to do with the reliability of the device
arising from every part being put there or approved by the same vendor.

_______________________

Bethesda, Md.:
Web 2.0 feels so old - what do you envision for Web 3.0 or even 4.0?

Jonathan Zittrain:
Heh. Why not jump to Web 5.0 while we're at it? (It reminds me of the
old modems we used to use -- from 300 baud, to 1200 baud, then 2400,
15200, 34800, and 56K -- why not just jump straight to really fast?!)

Web 2.0 means different things to different people,
and I'm actually pretty amazed at how much the versioning usually applied to
a piece of software can be tagged to the Web. (It certainly does mean a Web
based on a new version of its protocols.)

So: I think the idea of a Web page may be beginning
to feel old; browse-and-click isn't the only way to interact with
information and people. Some new technologies are rearranging that, but part
of the question of whether we'll see them go mainstream is whether our
endpoint devices will remain "unowned" by any single vendor or small group
of vendors. If we're still using browsers ten years from now as the main way
to be online, something's wrong.

_______________________

Tucson, Ariz.: Is Cybercrime coming from Africa
undermining the potential for e-commerce in Africa? What do you think of the
spam emails originating from Africa? What can be done about them before they
evolve into more sophisticated forms of phishing?

Thanks,

___________________________________

William A. Foster

Faculty Associate

Science, Technology, and Society Program

Arizona State University

Jonathan Zittrain: In the last chapter of the book
I quote from Gene Spafford, a renowned computer science professor:

"We can't defend against the threats we are facing
now. If these mass computer giveaways succeed, shortly we will have another
billion users online who are being raised in environments of poverty, with
little or no education about proper IT use, and often in countries where
there is little history of tolerance (and considerable history of religious,
ethnic and tribal strife). Access to eBay and YouTube isn't going to give
them clean water and freedom from disease. But it may help breed resentment
and discontent where it hasn't been before.

Gee, I can barely wait. The metaphor that comes to
mind is that if we were in the ramp-up to the Black Plague in the middle
ages, these groups would be trying to find ways to subsidize the purchase of
pet rats."

I don't agree with that. I think that movements
like One Laptop Per Child are fascinating, and -- putting aside the
implementation details that might alone make it fail -- I very much like the
idea of bringing new groups of people online without giving them only
"applications" like a mobile phone. I'd love to see what I call generative
platforms deployed in areas that haven't really seen any consumer
information technology -- and then see how readily a hacker culture can
arise in the best sense, exactly the culture that brought us so many of the
applications we now think to be central.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: With Google, Microsoft, Yahoo
(unless it gets eaten up by Microsoft) continue to dominate the industry or
will the Internet open back up to the marketplace to allow smaller companies
to service niche markets in a profitable way?

Jonathan Zittrain: I think Google in particular is
in a great position right now: a river of money flowing by them called
search (and Ad Words); talented engineers with a day a week of free time to
noodle around; and a brand that makes many of the next generation of
talented engineers want to work there.

But the great thing about the Internet and PC we
have today -- not a permanent thing, of course -- is that if someone comes
along and invents better search, it wouldn't take that much for people to
switch away. That may change as more and more of our own data goes online
and gets cross-referenced, which is why Google and others are smart to want
to create a single portal for search, mail, documents, etc.

Of particular interest to me are Web platforms like
Facebook and Google Apps: people can code new stuff to run there, and
there's a ton of creativity going into it, notwithstanding how annoying the
Vampire App is on Facebook. One question is how open those platforms will be
and can stay. I'm nervous that, naturally, Facebook or Google can (and do)
shut down apps they don't like (or as Steve Jobs can and will do in the
iPhone apps store), in a way that Bill Gates never really could do on a
Windows box.

_______________________

Danville, Calif.: In your opinion, who are the
smartest men in Internet technology?

Jonathan Zittrain: Why limit it to just men? :)

Esther Dyson thinks big and asks tough, skeptical
questions. Of course, the usual suspects: Sergey Brin is an amazingly smart
guy who shoots straight. Mark Zuckerberg has made brilliant strategic
decisions, notwithstanding the more headline-grabbing tactical hiccups like
Facebook Beacon. Charlie Nesson, a colleague at HLS, framed many cyberspace
issues as ones of the commons nearly fifteen years ago. And Larry Lessig is
near-effortlessly genius. In my view. :)

The Center for Studies in Higher Education is
conducting research to "understand the needs and desires of faculty for
in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed
as research is being executed) as well as archival publication." With the
study now into its second year, the Center has released an interim report
with some of the early findings based on interviews with over 150 faculty
members in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

Some of the questions that the study seeks to
answer include:

-- "What will scholars want to do in their research
and with their research results, and what new forms of communication do or
do not support those desires?"

-- "How will scholars want to disseminate and
receive input on their work at various lifecycle stages?"

-- "How do institutions and other stakeholders
support these faculty needs, if at all?"

The Spring 2008 "Draft Interim Report: Assessing
the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication," by Diane Harley, et al.,
is available at

The Center for Studies in Higher Education at the
University of California Berkeley is a "multi-disciplinary research and
policy center on higher education [that is] oriented to California, the
nation, and comparative international issues." For more information,
contact:

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. recently published the
second version of "The Google Book Search Bibliography." The resource
provides citations and links to over a hundred English-language references
to scholarly papers and newspaper articles. The bibliography presents a
comprehensive examination of the Google service and the "legal, library, and
social issues associated with it." The bibliography is available at

The above link was forwarded by Richard Campbell who points out that the
video was created using Camtasia's time lapse capability.

Jensen Comment
I think what this shows is that artists can do things on the computer that us
less talented computer users cannot do or cannot do without years of training.
Van Gogh once said it took many years to learn his craft even though he had some
innate talent.

As many as two million people in the United States
use American Sign Language, but not every user knows what every one of the
thousands of signs mean. And there is no dictionary in which to look them
up—sign dictionaries are organized by the written definition of the sign,
not by the physical movement.

Now a team of researchers at Boston University is
working on an interactive video project that would allow someone to trace an
unfamiliar sign in front of a Web camera and have a computer program
interpret and explain its meaning,
according to the Associated Press.

The researchers, working with a three-year,
$900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are trying to capture
3,000 ASL signs on video. Their goal is to develop
a “backwards” dictionary that will allow people to look up any unfamiliar
gesture.

If a deaf person signs to a someone who doesn’t
understand the sign, that person could sit down in front of a computer,
repeat the sign into a Web cam, and the program would identify possible
translations by recognizing the sign’s visual properties.

Dear Bob
Thanks for bringing this to our attention! I hope that it will work since
every deaf person signs any signfrom a tiny bit to a lot more differently
than the next deaf person does. This promises to be a longer term project.

A former assistant professor of accounting at the
University of Tampa has pleaded guilty to stealing $120,000 from the American
Spaniel Club.
She was accused of writing 71 Spaniel Club checks to herself between July 2006
and March 2007 to feed an Internet gambling addiction. Instead of doing jail
time, Lippincott, now a part-time accounting professor at Nova Southeastern
University in Ft. lauderdale, FL, was sentenced to 15 years' probation. During
that time, she is required to pay $500 a month until June 2009 and $1,000 a
month after that until her probation ends, the Tampa Tribune reported. Some of
the money will go directly to the spaniel club; the rest will be used to repay
the club's insurance carrier.
AccounitngWeb, May 16, 2008 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=105175

So, I finished my marketing project slides and have
begun work on finishing the accounting project (an analysis of The Gap's
financial reports).

It turns out that one of my accounting project
group members --yup,
you guessed it-- plagiarized her contribution to
our paper!

The other group member and I initially were
suspicious because of the three pages she sent us, the third page was
written in the first person plural and thus was obviously taken from the
company's annual report. However, the plagiarizer wrote in her original
email, "The financial information is in draft form right now," so we decided
to give her the benefit of the doubt that perhaps this part was just her
research notes and she planned to rewrite and properly cite the information.

So, my reply to her email included the question,
"Is what you sent us so far a draft that you wrote or is it notes copied
from somewhere else or what?"

She replied, "the first 2 pages i wrote and the
bottom is info i found."

OK, so far, so good. She was not claiming to have
written the part that she very obviously hadn't written. Since I had the
much more pressing marketing project to deal with and the accounting project
isn't due until the 15th, I put off doing anything else with it for a week.

Well, I just started working on the accounting
project again, and since I still don't trust her, I started plugging phrases
into Google. It turns out that the entire two pages she claims to have
written herself are ripped off from Hoover's:
The Gap Company Description: She copied this
paragraph word-for-word with only the following minor changes:

replaced "ubiquitous" with "ever-present"

deleted the reference to poplin

updated 3,100 to 3,150

deleted the word "iconic"

deleted the word "budgeteer"

deleted the fragment "each also has its own
online incarnation"

So of the 112 words in the paragraph, she changed
only 13 of them. This does not count as adequate paraphrasing.

Industry Forecast: She copied the opening sentence
of the "Industry Forecast" section word-for-word with NO changes.

I'm not sure where she got her "Comparison to
Industry & Market" and "Top Competitors" tables from, but the weird
formatting strongly suggests that they were not created by her in Word (it's
a Word document) but were copy/pasted off a website as well.

She does cite the source she ripped off, "Hoover's
Handbook of World Business 2008", at the end of her document, but in no way
does changing only 13 out of 286 words (thus copying 95% of the source
word-for-word) count as "writing" something.

I am so fucking pissed. Because *I* would have
gotten an F on the project too (the professor has emphasized that plagiarism
would not be tolerated) if I'd believed her and turned in the paper with her
section left as is. This woman is not some stupid little freshman who
doesn't know better, she's on her last 12 credits of her MBA. She fucking
knows better and she decided to take the risk anyway and fuck the rest of us
over because she's too fucking lazy to ethically research and write two
fucking pages.

I AM TURNING THE BITCH IN. I'm certain that my
other group member will support me on this and we will just complete the
project by ourselves.

Update: What really fucking sucks
is the plagiarizer is the one who picked The Gap as our paper topic. I
don't want to write a paper analyzing the fucking Gap. I don't even shop
there. I'd rather do Amazon. But the non-plagiarizer and I already have
1/3 to 1/2 a paper about The Gap so it'll take us less time to finish the
stupid thing than to start on a new company.

Update II: I heard back from the
professor: "Thank you very much for telling me this. You did the right
thing in breaking away into a separate group. There is nothing further that
you need to do." Dude, what are you doing up at 4am?

"Charges of Insider Trading for a Wall Street Luminary," by Louise
Story, The New York Times, May 30, 2008 ---
Click Here

John F. Marshall spent decades teaching at business
schools and watching his students parlay his lessons into fortunes on Wall
Street. But when he and another professor reached for some of those riches
themselves, events took a startling turn, the authorities say.

Dr. Marshall, a retired professor at St. John’s
University and a fixture on the Wall Street lecture circuit, was accused by
the Securities and Exchange Commission in March of passing inside
information about a multibillion-dollar corporate takeover to a professor at
Pace University. The Pace professor, Alan L. Tucker, made more than $1
million trading on the tips in 2007, according to the S.E.C. The Justice
Department has filed criminal charges.

The developments have stunned Dr. Marshall’s former
colleagues and students, who describe him as a meticulous scholar and a
generous, unassuming teacher. The accusations have also jolted Wall Street,
where Dr. Marshall is considered one of the wise men of financial
engineering.

“I am just shocked beyond belief,” said Jennifer
Kim, a St. John’s graduate who was taught by Dr. Marshall. “If he wanted to,
he could have made money — lots of money — years ago.”

Suspicious trading has set off alarms at the S.E.C.
during the record rush of corporate takeovers in recent years. Since 2006,
the agency has filed more lawsuits related to insider trading than during
the entire decade of the 1990s.

But the usual suspects are bankers, analysts and
executives — not academicians like Dr. Marshall, the author of books like
“Financial Engineering: A Complete Guide to Financial Innovation.”

Yet, like many business school professors, Dr.
Marshall, 56, and Dr. Tucker, 47, built twin careers by hopscotching from
teaching to consulting. Dr. Marshall’s stature in the field of finance
eventually lead a board position at a fledgling electronic exchange for
stock options — a position the S.E.C. said he had used to pass illegal tips
to Dr. Tucker, a friend and business associate. The men declined to comment
for this article.

It’s a remarkable turnabout for Dr. Marshall, who
co-founded the leading professional society for practitioners of financial
engineering, the International Association of Financial Engineering, the
math-heavy discipline that revolutionized Wall Street in recent years.

Ms. Kim recalled how her former professor gave away
complex computer software to his students. Dr. Marshall helped establish a
graduate program in financial engineering at Polytechnic University in
Manhattan and fostered the explosive growth of financial derivatives. He
also became a popular lecturer at banks like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank
and Merrill Lynch.

Few people on or off Wall Street moved in such
rarefied financial circles. During a long, distinguished career, Dr.
Marshall mixed with Nobel laureates like Myron S. Scholes, Fischer Black and
Franco Modigliani — whose pioneering theories transformed the world of
finance — while he himself lived modestly on Long Island.

“Everybody loves Jack Marshall” said David F.
DeRosa, president of DeRosa Research and Trading and a former Wall Street
trader. “He is like the uncle of derivatives.”

In an essay published in the 2007 book, “How I
Became a Quant,” Dr. Marshall wrote that his work on Wall Street had
informed his academic research.

“What I was seeing during the day in the Street was
growing increasingly at odds with what I saw being taught in business
schools,” Dr. Marshall wrote. “Most of academia was missing the great
transformation that was taking place in finance.”

He recruited Dr. Tucker to help edit the financial
engineering society’s journal, and together they proposed new types of
options that companies might use to protect themselves from economic
downturns. The pair also opened a small consulting firm in Port Jefferson,
N.Y.

Their work was notable for its real-world
applications, professional colleagues said.

“A lot of academics publish papers that have very
little to do with practical applications,” said Anthony Herbst, a retired
finance professor at the University of Texas in El Paso. “Jack Marshall
bridges the gap.”

Dr. Marshall retired from St. John’s in 2000 and
went on to help form the International Securities Exchange, the electronic
options exchange. He later became a member of its board and the chairman of
its finance and audit committee.

The trouble began in late 2006, when Eurex, a
German exchange, expressed interest in buying the I.S.E. According to the
S.E.C., Dr. Marshall tipped off Dr. Tucker about the deal, sharing insider
details of the proposed transaction through multiple phone calls.

Dr. Tucker later bought options giving him the
right to buy I.S.E. stock, as well as shares in the American exchange,
through an Ameritrade account, the S.E.C. said in its complaint. In e-mail
exchanges, Dr. Tucker referred to the scheme as “the program,” according to
the S.E.C. Dr. Marshall’s brother-in-law, Mark R. Larson, 45, bought shares
of I.S.E. stock based on the tips, S.E.C. says.

When Eurex agreed to buy I.S.E. for $67.50 a share
in 2007, the value of the I.S.E. stock and options soared, producing a
profit of $1.1 million. It is unclear if Dr. Marshall profited personally.
But the options trades set off alarms with market regulators because Dr.
Tucker was the only person buying some of the instruments just before the
takeover.

Since the S.E.C. filed its complaint in March, the
men have fallen out of touch with friends and colleagues, longtime
acquaintances said. Dr. Tucker finished out the spring term teaching at Pace
but did not turn up at a recent finance conference he was scheduled to
attend in China. Dr. Marshall has resigned from the I.S.E.’s board. Recent
calls placed to his consulting firm on Long Island were unanswered.

At universities and on Wall Street, people who know
Dr. Marshall are dumbfounded.

Manuchehr Shahrokhi, a finance professor at
California State University at Fresno, said he was so surprised to hear
about the allegations that he looked up the S.E.C. complaint to
double-check. He could not reconcile the accusations with the man knew —
someone he once heard speak on ethics in the derivatives markets.

“You know, sometimes greed takes over your
knowledge and your skills and everything else. But he is not a greedy man,”
Dr. Shahrokhi said. “Really, the only conclusion I can come up with is it
must have been an accident. I do not believe that a person of his stature
would do this.”

Kristin Roovers was a postdoctoral fellow at the
University of Pennsylvania with a bright career ahead of her—a trusted
member of a research laboratory at the medical school studying the role of
cell growth in diabetes.

But when an editor of The Journal of Clinical
Investigation did a spot-check of one of her images for an article in
2005, Roovers's research proved a little too perfect.

The image had dark bands on it, supposedly showing
different proteins in different conditions. "As we looked at it, we realized
the person had cut and pasted the exact same bands" over and over again,
says Ushma S. Neill, the journal's executive editor. In some cases a copied
part of the image had been flipped or reversed to make it look like a new
finding. "The closer we took a look, the more we were convinced that the
data had been fabricated or manipulated in order to support the
conclusions."

As computer programs make images easier than ever
to manipulate, editors at a growing number of scientific publications are
turning into image detectives, examining figures to test their authenticity.

And the level of tampering they find is alarming.
"The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal," says Hany Farid, a
computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with
journal editors to help them detect image manipulation. Doctored images are
troubling because they can mislead scientists and even derail a search for
the causes and cures of disease.

Ten to 20 of the articles accepted by The
Journal of Clinical Investigation each year show some evidence of
tampering, and about five to 10 of those papers warrant a thorough
investigation, says Ms. Neill. (The journal publishes about 300 to 350
articles per year.)

In the case of Ms. Roovers, editors notified the
federal Office of Research Integrity, which polices government-financed
science projects. The office concluded that the images had been improperly
manipulated, as had images the researcher had produced for papers published
in three other journals. That finding led two of those journals to retract
papers that Ms. Roovers had co-authored, papers that had been cited by other
researchers dozens of times.

The episode damaged careers—Ms. Roovers resigned
from the lab and is ineligible for U.S. government grants for five years—and
delayed progress in an important line of scientific inquiry.

Experts say that many young researchers may not
even realize that tampering with their images is inappropriate. After all,
people now commonly alter digital snapshots to take red out of eyes, so why
not clean up a protein image in Photoshop to make it clearer?

"This is one of the dirty little secrets—that
everybody massages the data like this," says Mr. Farid. Yet changing some
pixels for the sake of "clarity" can actually change an image's scientific
meaning.

The Office of Research Integrity says that 44
percent of its cases in 2005-6 involved accusations of image fraud, compared
with about 6 percent a decade earlier.

New tools, such as software developed by Mr. Farid,
are helping journal editors detect manipulated images. But some researchers
are concerned about this level of scrutiny, arguing that it could lead to
false accusations and unnecessarily delay research.

Easy to Alter

The alterations made by Ms. Roovers at the
University of Pennsylvania were "very easy" to do, says Richard K. Assoian,
a professor of pharmacology at Penn who worked with the young researcher and
served as her mentor while she was a doctoral student at the University of
Miami. "It's basic Photoshopping," he says.

Ms. Roovers admitted that she used the software,
though she says she was not the only one in the lab to do so.

"I certainly did something wrong, but I don't think
I was alone in the whole thing," she says, adding that it was not her intent
to deceive. "It was trying to present it even better."

Computer
defeats humans at the NYT’s crossword PuzzlesCrossword-solving computer program WebCrow has defeated
25 human competitors in a puzzle competition in Riva del Garda, Italy. The
program took both first- and second-place honors in the contest, which was
staged as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, New
Scientist reported Thursday. The two English puzzles were taken from The New
York Times and The Washington Post, while two Italian puzzles were taken from
newspapers in the country. A fifth puzzle featured clues in both languages taken
from all four sources. "It exceeded our expectations because there were around
15 Americans in the competition," said Marco Ernandes, who created WebCrow along
with Giovanni Angelini and Marco Gori. "Now we'd like to test it against more
people with English as their first language."
"Computer defeats humans at crossword," PhysOrg, September 1, 2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news76345125.html

Question
Will daily working of crossword puzzles and similar mental exercise deter
the rate of cognitive decline in older brains?

If you thought recent
clinical trials of reduced-fat diets and breast cancer, or
calcium/vitamin D and hip fractures, were disappointing when the
intervention failed to live up to its billing, you haven't seen studies
of whether mental training slows the rate of cognitive decline resulting
from aging.

The largest such study,
called Active, was launched in 1998 and is still going. It trained 2,832
adults, aged 65 years old to 94, in memory, reasoning or visual
attention and perception. Disappointment ensued. Though the trainees did
better on the skill they practiced, that didn't translate to improvement
on the others (memory training didn't sharpen reasoning, for instance).

Worse, when the trainees
were tested years later, performance fell more than it did in the
untrained group, according to a new analysis by Timothy Salthouse of the
University of Virginia, a veteran of studies on aging and cognition.
That probably reflects the fact that if performance rises it has further
to fall, he says.

But there is a larger
issue. "There is no convincing empirical evidence that mental activity
slows the rate of cognitive decline," he concludes from an exhaustive
review of decades of studies. "The research I reviewed is just not
consistent with the idea that engaging in mentally stimulating
activities as you age prevents or slows cognitive decline."

Many scientists, not to
mention the rest of us, believe it does. The "mental exercise"
hypothesis has been around since 1920, and studies find that higher
mental activity -- more hours per week spent reading, doing crossword
puzzles, learning a language or the like -- is associated with better
cognitive function. That has spawned the idea that, to keep your brain
young(ish), you should partake of intellectual challenges.

But this logic has
a hole big enough to drive a truck through. Just because older adults
who are more mentally active are sharper than peers who are cognitive
couch potatoes doesn't mean mental activity in old age raises cognitive
performances, let alone slows the rate of decline. To conclude that it does confuses correlation with
causation.

Consider an alternative
that is gaining scientific support. Say you enter old age (by which I
mean your 30s, when mental functioning starts heading south,
accelerating in your 50s) with a "cognitive reserve" -- a cushion of
smarts. If so, you are likely to be able to remember appointments,
balance a checkbook and understand Medicare Part D (OK, maybe not) well
into your 60s and 70s. But not because your brain falls apart more
slowly. Instead, you started off so far above the threshold where
impaired thinking and memory affect your ability to function that normal
decline leaves you still all right.

The Active study isn't
the only reason scientists are rethinking the
use-it-and-you-won't-lose-it idea. In the Seattle Longitudinal Study,
older adults received five hours of training on spatial rotation (what
would a shape look like if it turned?) or logic (given three patterns,
which of four choices comes next?). As in Active, people got better on
what they practiced.

But seven years later,
their performance had declined just as steeply (though, again, from a
higher starting point) as the performance of people with no training,
scientists reported last year. That supports the cognitive reserve idea
-- if you enter middle age with a good memory and reasoning skills you
stay sharp longer -- not the mental-exercise hypothesis.

Even in the most
mentally engaged elderly -- chess experts, professors, doctors -- mental
function declines as steeply as in people to whom mental exercise means
choosing which TV show to watch. Again, profs and docs enter old age
with a brain functioning so far above the minimum that even with the
equal rate of decline they do better than folks with no cognitive
cushion.

Crossword puzzles do not
live up to the hope people invest in them, either. Age-related decline
is very similar in people whether or not they wrestled with 24 Downs,
Prof. Salthouse and his colleagues find in a recent study. There is "no
evidence" that puzzle fans have "a slower rate of age-related decline in
reasoning," he says.

Evaluating
use-it-and-you-won't-lose-it in a new journal, Perspectives on
Psychological Science, he ends on a grim note: There is "little
scientific evidence that engagement in mentally stimulating activities
alters the rate of mental aging." He regards the belief as "more of an
optimistic hope than an empirical reality."

But don't write off
mental exercise yet. True, neither one-time training nor regular mental
challenges such as crosswords slow the rate of cognitive decline. But
they do show that "older adults can be made to perform better on almost
anything they can be trained on," says Michael Marsiske of the
University of Florida, who helped run the Active study. "We're still
detecting differences seven years after the training."

In practical terms,
although mental function continues to decline even after mental
training, the latter can give old brains enough of a boost that they
nevertheless remain higher functioning than untrained brains. A number
of scientists think they understand what kind of training provides the
biggest, most enduring boost. Next week, I'll look at their ideas.

To Provide Answers or Not: That is the Question

I have this ongoing question
/ struggle about all these comments about students and exams and usefulness
of the unintentionally presented answers to questions.

I have great difficulty in
understanding why the students cannot ‘understand’ or ‘use’ the answers to
the questions when they are presented to them. The nagging sense is that it
is possible that the question (and the answer presented) has absolutely no
relationship to the material supposedly taught in the subject. If the
question asked doesn’t relate to the subject matter, then how would knowing
the answer elicit anything more than copying the answer from the back to the
front of the paper. Or perhaps, if the question is so obtuse and ‘off target
for the subject’ then what difference does it make if the student knows
whether the answer is correct or just wind? Quite obviously there is the
explanation that the students simply did not see the ‘answers’ … but (again
IMO) that is significantly different than not understanding the question and
/ or the answer.

The contributor who made
exam questions where all the answers were False exposes one of the common
myths about TorF exams. Just because a random probability of getting the
right answer to a single question on a TorF test is .5, that does not mean
that the % of questions correctly answered F is 50% … The research indicates
that TorF questions that are correctly answered F are better discriminators
than those questions where the correct answer is T. If your objective is to
separate or rank those who know the subject material from those who do not
know the material, then TorF questions that are in fact F appear to be
better at doing the separation.

It is not easy to write good
TorF questions. For that matter it is not easy to write any test item that
is both effective and efficient in measurement terms or reliable and
relevant to the subject matter. I am of the long held view that it is
important to test what we teach, and particularly for summative evaluation
to make our learning objectives clear and obvious to the students. I think
that it is important for us, as teachers, to say to our students this is
what you must be able to do … we can set our goals at different levels in
the cognitive processes … we can use Bloom’s taxonomy to help guide us in
our measurements. Clearly objective testing is easier at the lower levels of
knowledge, comprehension and application. Higher levels of cognitive
processing, analysis, synthesis, evaluation and particularly creativity are
much more difficult (but not impossible) to test with objective (TorF or MC)
items.

After that ramble,
I’ll go back to the premise that it is difficult for me to see any way that
having the answer on the back of the page cannot help the students answer an
appropriate summative exam question.

June 2, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Henry,

I might
reverse the question about giving students answers and ask why professors
normally prefer cases that have teaching note solutions or guidelines for
solutions as opposed to cases written by authors who do not provide any
teaching notes.

Obviously,
instructors prefer teaching notes to reassure themselves that their own
solutions are not misleading students.

I also get
a feeling of self worth when I find errors in teaching notes --- that sort
of Eureka surge that proves I’ve still got it.

But mostly I
think instructors prefer teaching notes because teaching notes are sometimes
great learning tools alongside complex problems. One of my favorite cases
that I used over and over when teaching accounting theory is “Questrom vs.
Federated Department Stores, Inc.: A Question of Equity Value," by Gary
Taylor, William Sampson, and Benton Gup, Issues in Accounting Education,
May 2001, pp. 223-256. This is perhaps the best short case that I've ever
read. It will undoubtedly help my students better understand weighted
average cost of capital, free cash flow valuation, and the residual income
model. The three student handouts are outstanding. Bravo to Taylor,
Sampson, and Gup. If you subscribe to the electronic option of the American
Accounting Association, you can download the case and its teaching note from
http://www.atypon-link.com/AAA/loi/iace
I found it better to assign homework asking students to critique the
teaching note solutions rather than flounder trying to devise their own
solutions. Certainly not all cases are like this, but this is an example
where I think it is better for students to have suggested (albeit
controversial) solutions. By the way, I think all the approaches used to
estimate equity value are baloney, but this case is a great foil for delving
into what’s wrong with Ohlson, Penman et al. approaches to equity valuation.
One of the things I like the best is about the Questrom case is that these
simplistic (read that missing variable) valuation approaches give such
wildly different valuation outcomes.

This is one
of those cases where I’m absolutely convinced that it’s better to hand the
teaching note out along with the case itself. My students would’ve been lost
at sea trying to develop their own valuations, and I

I’m not
convinced that objective questions are better for students with lower-level
knowledge than higher-level knowledge. I think it is easier to write
objective questions for students with lower-level knowledge, but I’ve never
seen where subjective questions are necessarily better discriminators than
objective questions on licensure examinations such as CPA examinations. In
fact, subjective questions on such examinations may lead to much greater
grader variations.

In any case,
most of the research evidence that I’ve read on objective versus subjective
examinations points to no general conclusion that objective questions are
worse at any level of learner knowledge. Objective questions have a drawback
in giving students with no clue as to an answer a chance to guess, but with
enough questions the guesses don’t count for much.

In
accounting theory I’ve experimented repeatedly with essay final examinations
versus huge objective question examinations, some of which merely give
answer choices to short (not humungous) problems. What students hated the
most was that they frequently could not derive any of the answer choices.
This of course can be solved by a “none of the above” choice accompanied by
an option of giving part credit for detailed “none of the above” choices
that I could follow as a grader.

A researcher at Trinity College Dublin has software
that lets users map the links between Wikipedia pages. His Web site is
called “Six Degrees of Wikipedia,” modeled after the trivia game
“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”Instead of the
degrees being measured by presence in the same film, degrees are determined
by articles that link to each other.

For example, how many clicks through Wikipedia does
it take to get from “Gatorade” to “Genghis Khan”? Three: Start at
“Gatorade,” then click to “Connecticut,” then “June 1,” then “Genghis Khan.”

Stephen Dolan, the researcher who created the
software, has also used the code to determine which Wikipedia article is the
“center” of Wikipedia—that is, which article is the hub that most other
articles must go through in the “Six Degrees” game. Not including the
articles that are just lists (e.g., years), the article closest to the
center is “United Kingdom,” at an average of 3.67 clicks to any other
article. “Billie Jean King” and “United States” follow, with an average of
3.68 clicks and 3.69 clicks, respectively.

Jay Parini has taught poetry to many, many students
during his 30-plus years of college teaching. But the group of teenagers for
whom he has read and analyzed Robert Frost’s poems in recent weeks are
unlike the young people he has encountered in the classrooms of Dartmouth
and Middlebury Colleges since 1975.

“To them, Robert Frost is just a name on a plaque,”
said Parini, a poet, novelist and
biographer of Frost. “I can’t assume a damn thing
that they have any knowledge at all” about Frost or poetry.

Parini’s students these last two weeks have not had
much of a choice but to listen to the Middlebury professor. Their attendance
in the two sessions, the second of which was Tuesday, was mandatory as part
of a “court diversion” program they entered in lieu of going to jail. Their
crime: trashing a Vermont home in which Frost summered for the last two
decades of his life, as a party they held raged out of control. The high
school students, who were invited to the Homer Noble Farm, an unheated
farmhouse in Ripton, Vt., by a youthful former employee of Middlebury
College, which owns the structure, burned furniture to keep warm, broke
china and soiled the carpets. They did more than $10,000 in damage.

The local prosecutor, Addison County State’s
Attorney John Quinn, contemplated sending them to jail. But he opted instead
for a more creative punishment. “I guess I was thinking that if these teens
had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was, and his contribution to
our society, that they would be more respectful of other people’s property
in the future and would also learn something from the experience,” he
told the Associated Press.

Quinn’s call to Parini suggesting that he teach the
wrongdoers about Frost caught the author and poet by surprise, but he
embraced the idea. In two sessions, Parini said he “tried to take it down to
brass tacks ... just reading some very moving Frost poems,” rather than
trying to beat the young people over the head with lectures. ("I had three
teenagers of my own,” he said.)

“Out Out,” which
describes a teenage farmhand’s loss of his hand, seemed to resonate with the
high schoolers who themselves hail mostly from farm country, Parini said.
And as he read from the seemingly inevitable“The Road Not
Taken,”Parini said, he could not help but suggest
to his temporary students that they might be “lost in your own woods.”

“This was a very moving and emotional experience,
and I think I really connected emotionally with these kids,” Parini said.
“The goal was to show them why poetry matters in their lives. That it’s not
just some monument on a hillside, but it has very crucial and vital things
ot say about their very own lives.”

As I was posting my son’s latest domino knockdown video on youtube, I
thought that creating domino courses could make a great teamwork exercise.
Here are my observations that lead me to this conclusion:

1.Setting up a domino
course is often very frustrating. You may get it all set up and then
part of it does not work. Also, you may accidentally knock down several
minutes or hours work.

2.When doing it in
teams (my son and I often work together), each person is responsible for
a part. Everybody’s part must work for the course to be successful.

3.Good communication
is key. You need a way to resolve disputes. Collaboration can lead to a
superior solution to a problem. You need to be able to deal with
failures, accidentally ruining someone else’s work.

4.For systems courses,
you have design, implementation, and control issues. Controls would
refer to using “safeties” or buffers between parts of the course in the
building stage to prevent an accidental knockdown from ruining the
entire course. Of course at the end you have to fill in the gaps, which
may be more problematic than not having safeties at all (cost-benefit
analysis).

5.You can incorporate
risk/reward by weighting grades for the project by difficulty factor of
the course. A straight line is easier than having
branches/spirals/stairs/towers/etc. or builder’s challenges (having to
complete part of the course while the dominoes are falling).

Microsoft has decided to enlarge a service of keen
interest to colleges, even as the company last week
dumpedanother offering used by higher education,
its Live Search Books program. Now
Live@edu,the free Web-based e-mail and online
collaboration program for students and alumni, is getting much larger
inboxes, the ability to handle bigger attached files, true shared calendars,
and the chance for colleges to block student e-mail containing words they
deem offensive, the company announced today.

Tired of the 5 gigabyte inbox? Live@edu now offers
accounts with 10 gigabytes, and the capacity to handle attachments up to 20
megabytes in size, says Bruce Gabrielle, senior product manager for the
service. The boost is because the company has decided that, in addition to
handing campuses Microsoft Hotmail accounts (with university-based e-mail
addresses), it will offer accounts on the more powerful Microsoft Exchange
Web access system. That gives users access to Windows programs like Outlook,
with e-mail, full calendars, and a contact list.

It’s a solution used by many businesses, and
Microsoft has been quietly offering it, in a form calledExchange Labs,to a few educational institutions since last fall.
Drexel University, Hinds Community College, and the Colorado Community
College system are some that have tried it.

With Exchange Labs, users at the same university
can see one another’s calendars to set up meetings. E-mail tracking is
enabled, so students can see whether a term paper was delivered to a
professor’s inbox. They can also push e-mail to cell phones. (And they can
use Exchange to wipe data from those phones if they happen to lose them.)
Exchange Labs also gives university officials the ability to set up filters,
like spam filters, for offensive terms in e-mail, though Mr. Gabrielle says
he wasn’t sure what words, if any, that universities have tried placing on a
“do not type” list.

At this point the service is not being offered to
faculty members or administrators. “I think it’s a business model decision,”
Mr. Gabrielle said, noting that the company may need to figure out whether
it wants to allow ads on Web pages seen by those users; the student and
alumni service is ad-free.

The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) was
started by Bill Gates, Michael Dell and other technology titans concerned
about the declining performance of American students in math and science.
The public-private partnership funds efforts to increase the number of
students taking advanced placement courses in those subjects. But thanks to
the Washington Education Association, a teachers union, the initiative's
recent efforts in Washington state have been torpedoed.

Earlier this month NMSI announced that a $13.2
million grant slated for Washington state was being scrapped. Why? The
contract ran afoul of the union's collective bargaining agreement. NMSI
wanted to compensate teachers directly and include extra pay based on how
well students performed on AP exams. But under the teacher contracts, the
union is the exclusive agent for negotiating teacher pay and union officials
refused to compromise. They were willing to turn away free money for their
teacher members rather than abide this kind of merit pay.

State Representative Bill Fromhold, who was helping
to administer the grant, told the Seattle Times, "We worked hard to try to
find middle ground." But in the end, he said, "we got caught in the middle
of the grant requirements and collective bargaining laws in the state of
Washington that have to be followed."

Other heavily unionized states, such as
Massachusetts and Connecticut, were able to reach agreements and will
receive the math and science money notwithstanding similar bargaining
agreements. And while the Washington union is spurning millions of dollars
in grant money, it's also suing the state for the alleged inadequate funding
of public schools. Hmmm. Could it be that union chiefs care more about
protecting their monopoly than what students are learning?

Represented by a pluckish plum-colored pigeon, the
Pidgin open-source messaging application could potentially clean up any
pesky and persistent messaging conundrums. The application allows users to
access multiple instant messaging networks from one window. Some of the
supported instant messaging applications include Google Talk, MySpaceIM,
Jabber, and Gadu- Gadu. This version of Pidgin is compatible with computers
running Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000, and XP.

With RSS feeds busting out all over, it can be hard
to keep track of one's favorites. Feed Demon 2.7 can help ease such
potential information woes by offering a newsreader that is both simple
enough for neophytes and customizable enough for those who can't get enough
Boing Boing or style updates from the New York Times. This version of
FeedDemon 2.7 is compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer.

Life and Education in the Far North

Through adaptation and resilience, we overcome
personal and physical challenges. We change the future by changing ourselves in
the present. An extreme place is the common denominator. Inevitably extreme
places sustain different life styles, new businesses and ideas. Alaska is a
creative place. I am certain this trait is linked to a highly competitive
environment where life’s essentials, shelter, food and community are hard won
and cannot be taken for granted. Commencement at Chukchi represents the
possibility of a new beginning. Life can be lonely and harsh, but it is
precisely the juxtaposition of challenge, opportunity and freedom that draws us
here. In extreme situations can we learn to live in harmony or test our
potential as human beings. Daniel Julius, "Graduation, Kotzebue, 2008," by Daniel Julius, Inside
Higher Ed, June 10, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/06/10/julius

New Wiki Helps Humanities Researchers Find Online Tools A new wiki provides a directory of online tools for
humanities scholars. The site, which uses software that lets anyone edit or add
to the material, covers more than 20 categories, including blogging tools,
specialized search engines for scholars, and software programs that can record
what is on a user's screen. The site, called Digital Research Tools, or DiRT, is
run by Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University. The
Center for History and New Media at George Mason University runs a similar
collection of resources called
Exploring and Collecting History Online, or ECHO.
Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3068&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. recently published the
second version of "The Google Book Search Bibliography." The resource
provides citations and links to over a hundred English-language references
to scholarly papers and newspaper articles. The bibliography presents a
comprehensive examination of the Google service and the "legal, library, and
social issues associated with it." The bibliography is available at

Question
Can tennis line machines see better than players and referees?
The paper suggests adding a “health warning” to virtual reconstructions created
by technologies like Hawk-Eye.

A
new study from two Cardiff University
researchers attacks the accuracy of a “sports decision aid”—a technology
used to supplement or replace referee and umpire calls—used at Wimbledon.

Hawk-Eye, which makes calls in tennis, was
previously questioned in last year’s Wimbledon tennis championship. In the
final match, Roger Federer believed that a ball
hit by his opponent Rafael Nadal landed well behind the baseline. But the
umpire, who had initially called the ball out, deferred to Hawk-Eye’s
judgment that the ball was in.

This new study indicates Federer may have been
right. The researchers argue that the average error of the machine is
greater than the 3.6 millimeters reported by its manufacturers, and that
people can overestimate the ability of machines to settle human
disagreements accurately. The paper suggests
adding a “health warning” to virtual reconstructions created by technologies
like Hawk-Eye.

Every great city is a palimpsest, an old text upon
which new texts are inscribed before the old text is completely erased. My
native New York is one of those cities. This long volume (1,383 pages) is
among the most valuable I own. The authors adhere to scholarly exactitude
but never lose sight of the driving narrative that led eventually to the
city in which New Yorkers now live. The authors tell us what is knowable
about the Native Americans who were here before Europeans arrived. They
remind us that we had the good fortune to be established by a company (the
Dutch West India Co.) and not a king or a religious sect. After New
Amsterdam was taken at gunpoint by the British in 1664, the Dutch left us a
number of gifts, the most important of which was tolerance. Across the
centuries, in spite of slavery, riots, bigotry and the genteel brutalities
of class, tolerance prevailed. In our daily lives, for those who have lived
in New York for generations or who arrived last week, one fact is
triumphantly clear: We live peacefully in a grand, imperfect city of people
who are not like us. This book helps explain why.

2.A Time in Rome By Elizabeth
Bowen Knopf, 1959

Across a long life (1899-1973), the fine Irish
writer Elizabeth Bowen produced novels and memoirs that are dense with a
sense of place. By the time she decided to write about Rome and her stay
there for several months in the late 1950s, she knew that there was only one
way to experience the city: Read -- then get out of the house. "Knowledge of
Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain
through the thinning shoe leather," she writes in this marvelous portrait.
"Substantiality comes through touch and smell, and taste, the tastes of
different dusts. When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than
the intelligence." Bowen is not afraid to admit her ignorance (she
struggles, early on, to figure out exactly where to find the Seven Hills of
Rome). But through a combination of chance meetings, daily wanderings and
the sheer luck of getting lost, Bowen feels Rome emerging, with all its
mysteries, all its annoyances and, above all, its thrilling and humbling
sense of time.

3. Where the Air Is Clear By Carlos
Fuentes Obolensky, 1960

Carlos Fuentes's first novel (published in Spanish
in 1958) is set in the Mexico City I knew in 1956-57, when I was a student
there on the G.I. Bill. I walked some of these streets, passed some of these
fine houses, dangerous cantinas and dark, seductive nightclubs. But I was a
stranger, a young gringo with infantile Spanish and very little money, and I
could never know these places the way Fuentes did. After reading "Where the
Air Is Clear," I surely knew them better. In the novel, Fuentes does his own
riffs on Dos Passos and Faulkner, the way a first-class musician would. And
just as living in Mexico City made me see New York more clearly, so did this
work of high literary art. Each time I return to its pages and start reading
again, it's like a new book.

4. Paris By Andrew Hussey
Bloomsbury, 2006

Everybody is here in this history of the "secret
city" of Paris: Knights Templar, flâneurs, great whores, artistic
visionaries, charlatans, revolutionists, various Napoleons, Balzac and
Camus, flat-out criminals, and even Joan of Arc. The writing is clear and
exuberant, with a journalist's eye for the revealing details of place and
character and a scholar's scrupulous regard for meaning. After reading
"Paris," you will never see Europe's most beautiful city the same way. Or
Parisians. A few years ago, when reading the book, I reminded a friend that
one reason I love Paris (as Faulkner once said about Mississippi: in spite
of, not because) is that it was founded by Celts, from a wandering tribe
called the Parisii. They saw the Île de la Cité, protected by a flowing moat
on all sides. The tribe's wandering was over. "If that's the case," my
friend asked, "why is the food so good?" I paused and said: "Because they
had the great good fortune to be conquered by the Romans, not the Brits."

5.Invisible Cities By Italo Calvino
Harcourt, 1974

In this short, delightful work of fiction, a loving
prose-poem about cities, the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan, gray and full of
years, sits talking with Marco Polo, the young traveler from Venice. They
discuss cities, 55 of them in all: trading cities, thin cities, continuous
cities, cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and signs, cities and
the dead. Both men seem to know that every city begins its life as a work of
the imagination. All books on cities have such a moment: the time when
someone sees a harbor, a river, a protective mountain, or the Île de la Cité,
and says: Here. Stop here. Forever.

Mr. Hamill is the former editor of the New York Post and Daily News.
His books include the novel "North River" (2007).

Rule 2 : The world won't care about your
self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you
feel g ood about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out
of hi gh school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you
earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait
till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your
dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word f or burger flipping: they
called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents'
fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't
as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills,
cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought
you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your
parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners
and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing
grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right
answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real
life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You
don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you
FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time..

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life
people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end
up working for one.

We, in Ireland, can't figure out why you in the U. S
. are even bothering to hold an election. On one side, you have a bitch who is a
lawyer, married to a lawyer, running against a lawyer who is married to a bitch
who is a lawyer. On the other side, you have a war hero married to a good
looking woman who owns a beer distributorship.
Anonymous quote from Ireland forwarded by Auntie BevNow we know which
candidate will have the best foreign relations with Ireland!

Quotations forwarded by Nancy Mills

When Insults Had Class

There was a time when words were used beautifully. These glorious insults
are from an era when cleverness with words was still valued, before a great
portion of the English language was boiled down to four-letter words!

The exchange between Churchill and Lady Astor:
She said, "If you were my husband, I'd give you poison,"
And he said, "If you were my wife, I'd take it."

Gladstone, a member of Parliament, to Benjamin Disraeli:
"Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease."
"That depends, sir," said Disraeli, "On whether I embrace your policies or
your mistress."

"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -
Winston Churchill

"A modest little person, with much to be modest about." - Winston
Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great
pleasure." - Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the
dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading
it." - Moses Hadas

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I
know." - Abraham Lincoln

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved
of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar
Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a
friend.... if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one."
- Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." -
Stephen Bishop

The word moodle is an acronym for "modular
object-oriented dynamic learning environment", which is quite a mouthful.
The Scout Report stated the following about Moodle 1.7. It is a
tremendously helpful opens-source e-learning platform. With Moodle,
educators can create a wide range of online courses with features that
include forums, quizzes, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and surveys. On the
Moodle website, visitors can also learn about other features and read about
recent updates to the program. This application is compatible with computers
running Windows 98 and newer or Mac OS X and newer.

AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc

CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.